So they stood shoulder to shoulder to
Jan in a scheme that appalled them, and in the very first day of this
scheme they saw the woman blossoming forth in her old beauty and joy, and
at times fleeting visions of the old happiness at the post came to these
lonely men who were searing their souls for her. But to Jan one vision
came to destroy all others, and as the old light returned to the woman's
eyes, the glad smile to her lips, the sweetness of thankfulness and faith
into her voice, this vision hurt him until he rolled and tossed in agony
at night, and by day his feet were never still. His search for Cummins
now had something of madness in it. It was his one hope--where to the
other six there was no hope. And one day this spark went out of him. The
crust was gone. The snow was settling. Beyond the lake he found the chasm
between the two mountains, and, miles of this chasm, robbed to the bones
of flesh, he found Cummins. The bones, and Cummins' gun, and all that was
left of him, he buried in a crevasse.
He waited until night to return to the post. Only one light was burning
when he came out into the clearing, and that was the light in the woman's
cabin. In the edge of the balsams he sat down to watch it, as he had
watched it a hundred nights before. Suddenly something came between him
and the light. Against the cabin he saw the shadow of a human form, and
as silently as the steely flash of the Aurora over his head, as swiftly
as a lean deer, he sped through the gloom of the forest's edge and came
up behind the home of the woman and her child.
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