lost all semblance of humanity, taking on the
appearance of wild beasts, hunted and desperate. Their cheeks and
noses, as an aftermath of the freezing, had turned black.

Their frozen toes had begun to drop away at the first and second
joints. Every movement brought pain, but the fire box was insatiable,
wringing a ransom of torture from their miserable bodies. Day in, day
out, it demanded its food--a veritable pound of flesh--and they dragged
themselves into the forest to chop wood on their knees. Once, crawling
thus in search of dry sticks, unknown to each other they entered a
thicket from opposite sides.

Suddenly, without warning, two peering death's-heads confronted each
other. Suffering had so transformed them that recognition was
impossible. They sprang to their feet, shrieking with terror, and
dashed away on their mangled stumps; and falling at the cabin's door,
they clawed and scratched like demons till they discovered their
mistake.

Occasionally they lapsed normal, and during one of these sane
intervals, the chief bone of contention, the sugar, had been divided
equally between them. They guarded their separate sacks, stored up in
the cache, with jealous eyes; for there were but a few cupfuls left,
and they were totally devoid of faith in each other.

But one day Cuthfert made a mistake. Hardly able to move, sick with
pain, with his head swimming and eyes blinded, he crept into the cache,
sugar canister in hand, and mistook Weatherbee's sack for his own.

January had been born but a few days when this occurred. The sun had
some time since passed its lowest southern declination, and at meridian
now threw flaunting streaks of yellow light upon the northern sky. On
the day following his mistake with the sugar-bag, Cuthfert found
himself feeling better, both in body and in spirit. As noontime drew
near and the day brightened, he dragged himself outside to feast on the
evanescent glow, which was to him an earnest of the sun's future
intentions. Weatherbee was also feeling somewhat better, and crawled
out beside him. They propped themselves in the snow beneath the
moveless wind-vane, and waited.

The stillness of death was about them. In other climes, when nature
falls into such moods, there is a subdued air of expectancy, a waiting
for some small voice to take up the broken strain. Not so in the North.
The two men had lived seeming eons in this ghostly peace.

They could remember no song of the past; they