as he had counted them for
eighteen months. He was wasteful, prodigal. He had traveled forty miles
since morning but he felt no exhaustion. He gathered wood until he had
a great pile of it, and the flames of his fire leaped higher and higher
until the spruce needles crackled and hissed over his head. He boiled a
pot of weak tea and made a supper of caribou meat and a bit of bannock.
Then he sat with his back to a tree and stared into the flames.

The fire leaping and crackling before his eyes was like a powerful
medicine. It stirred things that had lain dormant within him. It
consumed the heavy dross of four years of stupefying torture and
brought back to him vividly the happenings of a yesterday that had
dragged itself on like a century. All at once he seemed unburdened of
shackles that had weighted him down to the point of madness. Every
fiber in his body responded to that glorious roar of the fire; a thing
seemed to snap in his head, freeing it of an oppressive bondage, and in
the heart of the flames he saw home, and hope, and life--the things
familiar and precious long ago, which the scourge of the north had
almost beaten dead in his memory. He saw the broad Saskatchewan
shimmering its way through the yellow plains, banked in by the
foothills and the golden mists of morning dawn; he saw his home town
clinging to its shore on one side and with its back against the purple
wilderness on the other; he heard the rhythmic chug, chug, chug of the
old gold dredge and the rattle of its chains as it devoured its tons of
sand for a few grains of treasure; over him there were lacy clouds in a
blue heaven again, he heard the sound of voices, the tread of feet,
laughter--life. His soul reborn, he rose to his feet and stretched his
arms until the muscles snapped. No, they would not know him back
there--now! He laughed softly as he thought of the old John
Keith--"Johnny" they used to call him up and down the few
balsam-scented streets--his father's right-hand man mentally but a
little off feed, as his chum, Reddy McTabb, used to say, when it came
to the matter of muscle and brawn. He could look back on things without
excitement now. Even hatred had burned itself out, and he found himself
wondering if old Judge Kirkstone's house looked the same on the top of
the hill, and if Miriam Kirkstone had come back to live there after
that terrible night when he had returned to avenge his father.

Four years! It was not so very long, though