He had known of men whom loneliness had driven
mad--and he was terribly lonely. He shivered as a piercing blast of wind
filled with a mourning wail swept over the cabin.
And that day, too, he had been taken with a touch of fever. It burned
more hotly in his blood to-night, and he knew that it was the
loneliness--the emptiness of the world about him, the despair and black
foreboding that came to him with the first early twilights of the Long
Night. For he was in the edge of that Long Night. For weeks he would only
now and then catch a glimpse of the sun. He shuddered.
A hundred and fifty miles to the south and east there was a Hudson's Bay
post. Eighty miles south was the nearest trapper's cabin he knew of. Two
months before he had gone down to the post, with a thick beard to cover
his face, and had brought back supplies--and the box. His wife had sent
up the box to him, only it had come to him as "John Blake" instead of Jim
Falkner, his right name. There were things in it for him to wear, and
pictures of the sweet-faced wife who was still filled with prayer and
hope for him, and of the kid, their boy. "He is walking now," she had
written to him, "and a dozen times a day he goes to your picture and says
'Pa-pa--Pa-pa'--and every night we talk about you before we go to bed,
and pray God to send you back to us soon."
"God bless 'em!" breathed Jim.
He had not lighted his pipe, and there was something in his eyes that
shimmered and glistened in the dull light.
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