you win or lose the moment McDowell first sets his eyes on you!" And
then, with a strange kind of sob in his chest, he was gone, and Keith's
eyes were blinded by the miracle of a hot flood of tears, and there
rose in him a mighty pride in the name of Derwent Conniston.

It was his name now. John Keith was dead. It was Derwent Conniston who
was living. And as he looked down into the cold, still face of the
heroic Englishman, the thing did not seem so strange to him after all.
It would not be difficult to bear Conniston's name; the difficulty
would be in living up to the Conniston code.

That night the rumble of the ice fields was clearer because there was
no wind to deaden their tumult. The sky was cloudless, and the stars
were like glaring, yellow eyes peering through holes in a vast,
overhanging curtain of jet black. Keith, out to fill his lungs with
air, looked up at the phenomenon of the polar night and shuddered. The
stars were like living things, and they were looking at him. Under
their sinister glow the foxes were holding high carnival. It seemed to
Keith that they had drawn a closer circle about the cabin and that
there was a different note in their yapping now, a note that was more
persistent, more horrible. Conniston had foreseen that closing-in of
the little white beasts of the night, and Keith, reentering the cabin,
set about the fulfillment of his promise. Ghostly dawn found his task
completed.

Half an hour later he stood in the edge of the scrub timber that rimmed
in the arctic plain, and looked for the last time upon the little cabin
under the floor of which the Englishman was buried. It stood there
splendidly unafraid in its terrible loneliness, a proud monument to a
dead man's courage and a dead man's soul. Within its four walls it
treasured a thing which gave to it at last a reason for being, a reason
for fighting against dissolution as long as one log could hold upon
another. Conniston's spirit had become a living part of it, and the
foxes might yap everlastingly, and the winds howl, and winter follow
winter, and long night follow long night--and it would stand there in
its pride fighting to the last, a memorial to Derwent Conniston, the
Englishman.

Looking back at it, Keith bared his head in the raw dawn. "God bless
you, Conniston," he whispered, and turned slowly away and into the
south.

Ahead of him was eight hundred miles of wilderness--eight hundred miles
between him and the little town