"The good God bless you, and keep you, and care for you evermore, Jan,"
she whispered. "Some day we will meet again."
And she kissed him again, and lifted the child to him, and Jan turned his
tired dogs back into the grim desolation of the North, where the Aurora
was lighting his way feebly, and beckoning to him, and telling him that
the old life of centuries and centuries ago was waiting for him there.
BUCKY SEVERN
Father Brochet had come south from Fond du Lac, and Weyman, the Hudson's
Bay Company doctor, north through the Geikee River country. They had met
at Severn's cabin, on the Waterfound. Both had come on the same
mission--to see Severn; one to keep him from dying, if that was possible,
one to comfort him in the last hour, if death came. Severn insisted on
living. Bright-eyed, hollow-cheeked, with a racking cough that reddened
the gauze handkerchief the doctor had given him, he sat bolstered up in
his cot and looked out through the open door with glad and hopeful gaze.
Weyman had arrived only half an hour before. Outside was the Indian
canoeman who had helped to bring him up.
It was a glorious day, such as comes in its full beauty only in the far
northern spring, where the air enters the lungs like sharp, warm wine,
laden with the tang of spruce and balsam, and the sweetness of the
bursting poplar-buds.
"It was mighty good of you to come up," Severn was saying to the doctor.
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