--a trick which men may know who study
physics at the fount.

And men who have shared their bed with death know when the call is
sounded. Mason was terribly crushed. The most cursory examination
revealed it.

His right arm, leg, and back were broken; his limbs were paralyzed from
the hips; and the likelihood of internal injuries was large. An
occasional moan was his only sign of life.

No hope; nothing to be done. The pitiless night crept slowly by--Ruth's
portion, the despairing stoicism of her race, and Malemute Kid adding
new lines to his face of bronze.

In fact, Mason suffered least of all, for he spent his time in eastern
Tennessee, in the Great Smoky Mountains, living over the scenes of his
childhood. And most pathetic was the melody of his long-forgotten
Southern vernacular, as he raved of swimming holes and coon hunts and
watermelon raids. It was as Greek to Ruth, but the Kid understood and
felt--felt as only one can feel who has been shut out for years from
all that civilization means.

Morning brought consciousness to the stricken man, and Malemute Kid
bent closer to catch his whispers.

'You remember when we foregathered on the Tanana, four years come next
ice run? I didn't care so much for her then. It was more like she was
pretty, and there was a smack of excitement about it, I think. But d'ye
know, I've come to think a heap of her. She's been a good wife to me,
always at my shoulder in the pinch. And when it comes to trading, you
know there isn't her equal. D'ye recollect the time she shot the
Moosehorn Rapids to pull you and me off that rock, the bullets whipping
the water like hailstones?--and the time of the famine at
Nuklukyeto?--when she raced the ice run to bring the news?

'Yes, she's been a good wife to me, better'n that other one. Didn't
know I'd been there?

'Never told you, eh? Well, I tried it once, down in the States. That's
why I'm here. Been raised together, too. I came away to give her a
chance for divorce. She got it.

'But that's got nothing to do with Ruth. I had thought of cleaning up
and pulling for the Outside next year--her and I--but it's too late.
Don't send her back to her people, Kid. It's beastly hard for a woman
to go back. Think of it!--nearly four years on our bacon and beans and
flour and dried fruit, and then to go back to her fish and caribou.
It's not good for her to have tried our ways, to come to know they're
better'n her people's, and then return to them.