He knew what it meant to have
the lungs "touched"--sloughing away in the spring, blood-spitting, and
certain death.
On the fourth day the temperature began to rise; the fifth it was clear,
and thirty degrees warmer. His thermometer had gone to sixty below zero.
It was now thirty below.
It was the morning of the sixth day when he reached the thick fringe of
stunted spruce that sheltered Peter God's cabin. He was half blinded. The
snow-filled blizzards cut his face until it was swollen and purple.
Twenty paces from Peter God's cabin he stopped, and stared, and rubbed
his eyes--and rubbed them again--as though not quite sure his vision was
not playing him a trick.
A cry broke from his lips then. Over Peter God's door there was nailed a
slender sapling, and at the end of that sapling there floated a tattered,
windbeaten red rag. It was the signal. It was the one voice common to all
the wilderness--a warning to man, woman and child, white or red, that had
come down through the centuries. Peter God was down with the smallpox!
For a few moments the discovery stunned him. Then he was filled with a
chill, creeping horror. Peter God was sick with the scourge. Perhaps he
was dying. It might be--that he was dead. In spite of the terror of the
thing ahead of him, he thought of Josephine. If Peter God was dead--
Above the low moaning of the wind in the spruce tops he cursed himself.
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