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Title: Sick Heart River
U.S. title: Mountain Meadow
Author: Buchan, John (1875-1940)
Author [introduction]: Swiggett, Howard (1891-1957)
Date of first publication: 1941
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Toronto: Musson, 1944
   [third printing]
Date first posted: 13 March 2013
Date last updated: 13 March 2013
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1052

This ebook was produced by David T. Jones, Al Haines
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






Books by John Buchan


Scholar-Gipsies, 1896

John Burnet of Barns, 1898

A History of Brasenose College, 1898

Grey Weather, 1899

A Lost Lady of Old Years, 1899

The Half-hearted, 1900

The Watcher by the Threshold, 1902

The African Colony, 1903

The Taxation of Foreign Income, 1905

A Lodge in the Wilderness, 1906

Some Eighteenth Century By-ways, 1908

Prester John, 1910

Sir Walter Raleigh, 1911

The Moon Endureth, 1912

Salute to Adventurers, 1915

The Thirty-Nine Steps, 1915

Greenmantle, 1916

Poems, Scots and English, 1917

Mr. Standfast, 1919

The South African Forces in France, 1920

Francis and Riversdale Grenfell, 1920

The Path of the King, 1921

A History of the Great War, 1921-22

Huntingtower, 1922

Midwinter, 1923

The Three Hostages, 1924

Lord Minto: A Memoir, 1924

The Royal Scots Fusiliers, 1925

John Macnab, 1925

The Dancing Floor, 1926

Homilies and Recreations, 1926

Witch Wood, 1927

The Runagates' Club, 1928

Montrose, 1928

The Courts of the Morning, 1929

Castle Gay, 1930

The Kirk in Scotland, 1930
(With Sir George Adam Smith)

The Blanket of the Dark, 1931

Sir Walter Scott, 1932

Julius Caesar, 1932

The Gap in the Curtain, 1932

The Magic Walking Stick, 1932

The Massacre of Glencoe, 1933

A Prince of the Captivity, 1933

Gordon at Khartoum, 1934

The Free Fishers, 1934

Oliver Cromwell, 1934

The King's Grace, 1935

The House of the Four Winds, 1935

The Island of Sheep, 1936

Augustus, 1937

The Interpreter's House, 1938

Memory Hold-the-Door, 1940

Canadian Occasions, 1940

Sick Heart River, 1941

Lake of Gold, 1941



Sick Heart River


By
JOHN BUCHAN


With an Introduction by
HOWARD SWIGGETT


TORONTO
THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY LTD.
1944


Copyright, Canada, 1941

by

The MUSSON BOOK COMPANY Ltd.
Toronto


_Third Printing_

PRINTED IN CANADA





Introduction

THEY HAD ALL POETRY IN THEM, AND THE HEROIC, AND A GREAT UNWORLDLINESS.
THEIR LIVES WERE LIKE OUR WEATHER--STORM AND SUN. ONE THING THEY NEVER
FEARED--DEATH.

                                                    THE RUNAGATES CLUB


John Buchan tells in _Memory Hold-the-Door_ how, as he lay ill during
the early months of the World War, he 'invented a young South African
called Richard Hannay, who had traits copied from many friends,' and
amused himself considering what he would do in various emergencies. He
gave Hannay certain companions, and the escapes, the hurried journeys,
the high adventures of these braves gradually spread to fill eleven
romances in the _Greenmantle_ series, three in the _Huntingtower_ group,
and the single book, _The Prince of the Captivity_, in which two or
three of the characters of the earlier tales appear.

To those who have come under the spell of these romances there is
nothing to equal them. It is no explanation to say that they are
'well-written,' exciting; that they range through wild places, country
lanes, or the stunted streets of London or Constantinople, or the
islands of the Aegean--characters in other books are as brave and
resourceful, women as fair, deeds as desperate; but here is a company of
adventurers whose lives seem to give you a promise that a chance will
come for you, amidst the dullest prose of life, to make the same wild
dedication of yourself


    'To unpathed waters, undreamed shores.'


Did it not come three times to an ageing Glasgow grocer,[1] as it did
again and again to the Master of Clanroyden?

There will be nothing 'silly and fantastic' about it as Clanroyden says
to Hannay there is about the Irish Sagas, but it will have 'the grave
good sense which you find in the Norse Sagas and of course the Greek.'
There is a great story-telling gift at work in these books, but I doubt
if it is that as much as the characters of the men themselves which give
them fascination. There had plainly been a Golden Age at Oxford when
Buchan went down and he has wonderfully remembered and woven together
the selected qualities of the Elizabethan lads he knew there. No
character, I should judge, is based on one actual person. In _Memory
Hold-the-Door_ he does say that his character Sandy Arbuthnot, Lord
Clanroyden, was suggested by Aubrey Herbert, but as one reads the
chapter 'This for Remembrance,' the chapter of laurel and rue for his
friends killed in the War, one sees how many of these men were given a
new immortality through all his tales. In the case of Clanroyden some of
the qualities of Auberon Herbert are so evident that this writer at
first thought Aubrey Herbert was a misprint.

[Footnote 1: _Huntingtower, Castle Gay, House of the Four Winds._]

Plainly the characters, the lives, and the fates of these two men, his
friends, Aubrey Herbert, the son of the Earl of Carnarvon, and Auberon
Herbert, Lord Lucas, greatly influenced all the romances. It was natural
that this should be so. The book most widely quoted through the tales,
and their implicit creed, is _Pilgrim's Progress_. I read it through
again as I began this introduction and I was happy to come on a line
Buchan had not quoted which seemed to me wonderfully to summarize the
attitude of his characters. Christian says to By-Ends, 'If you will go
with us, you must go against wind and tide.'

With all their advantages of birth and wealth, few men have gone so
gallantly against wind and tide as the two Herberts. Aubrey Herbert,
almost blind through his life, managed to be with the Guards at Mons, to
be at Anzac,[2] and at Kut el Amara. Auberon Herbert, one leg gone,
still got into the Royal Air Force and was killed in France.

Aubrey Herbert was born in 1880, Lord Clanroyden in 1882. Both were
educated at Eton and Oxford. Herbert was an attach at Constantinople
and travelled widely through the Turkish provinces and like Clanroyden
was the blood brother of every Albanian bandit. It is his deep knowledge
of the Middle East that we see in Clanroyden's part in _Greenmantle_.
And we see also in Clanroyden what Desmond MacCarthy saw in
Herbert--'the embodiment of this spirit which made mishaps, and even
graver misfortunes, more tolerable in his company.'

[Footnote 2: In _Gallipoli Memories_ Compton Mackenzie has an
unforgettable picture of Aubrey Herbert at Anzac. The last time he had
seen him was when Herbert was going home to Balliol by roofs from Christ
Church.]

Readers, however, will recognise Clanroyden also in Buchan's description
of Bron Herbert who came back to England after the South African War to
have a leg amputated at the knee. Buchan says: 'To a man of his tastes
such a loss might well have been crippling. To Bron it simply did not
matter at all. He behaved as if nothing had happened and went on with
the life he loved. He was just as fine a sportsman as before, and his
high spirits were, if anything, more infectious.' He hunted, played
tennis, and stalked on some of the roughest hills in Scotland. He became
a pilot in 1915, though many years over age, and his wonderful eye and
nerve stood him in good stead.

Buchan writes of the day of his death in 1916: "The concluding days of
October and the first week of November were full of strong gales from
the southwest, which gravely hampered our flying, for our machines
drifted too far over the enemy lines, and had to fight their way back
slowly against a head wind. It was an eerie season on the bleak Picardy
downs, scourged and winnowed by blasts, with the noise of guns from the
front line coming fitfully in the pauses, like the swell of breakers on
a coast. One evening, I rode over to have tea with Bron, when the west
was crimson with sunset and above me huge clouds were scudding before
the gale. They were for the most part ragged and tawny, like wild
horses, but before them went a white horse, the leader of the unearthly
cavalry. It seemed to me that I was looking at a ride of Valkyries, the
Shield Maids of Odin, hasting eastward to the battle-front to choose the
dead for Valhalla. . . ." Maurice Baring came to tell him next day Bron
was missing. Early in December they heard that he was dead.

It is obvious here how wonderfully Buchan has mingled the patterns of
these men. Much plainly of the character of Peter Pienaar in
_Greenmantle_ and _Mr. Standfast_, one of the great Boer hunters, was
drawn from the aristocrat Bron Herbert, and yet it is Lord Clanroyden
again Buchan is describing in _Memory Hold-the-Door_ when he says, 'I
have never known a more whole-hearted, hard-bitten nomad than Bron. . .
. He was a gipsy to the core of his being, a creature of the wayside
camp, wood-smoke, and the smell of earth.' And in Clanroyden there is
unquestionably a good deal of T. E. Lawrence. In his book, _Colonel
Lawrence_, Liddell Hart says, 'In the spring of 1916 he had a long-range
hand in a more important matter, the "capture" of Erzerum by the Russian
Caucasus Army after a curiously half-hearted defence. Readers of John
Buchan's subsequent novel _Greenmantle_ may find it worth while to
remember that fiction has often a basis of fact.' Clanroyden's later
strategy in his Olifa campaign in _Courts of the Morning_ is very much
that of Lawrence in Arabia, with a memory, too, of the march of Montrose
to Philiphaugh.

In _Sick Heart River_, Sir Edward Leithen's thoughts go back to his
friends in England--Hannay, Clanroyden, Roylance, Palliser-Yeates, and
Lord Lamancha. We know amazingly little about the fascinating Lord
Lamancha. We see him first coming into dinner in _John Macnab_, 'a
tallish man with a long, dark face, a small dark moustache, and a neat
pointed chin which gave him something of the air of an hidalgo.' In
_Memory Hold-the-Door_ Buchan tells of meeting Basil Blackwood, of whom
he had heard much at Oxford, in South Africa: 'With his pointed face and
neat black moustache he had the air of a Spanish hidalgo, and there was
always about him a certain silken foreign grace.' 'It was of a piece,'
Buchan says, with the anomalies of the War that 'a man of such varied
powers and rich experience should fall at the age of forty-six as a
Second Lieutenant' in a raid before Ypres. Buchan speaks of Blackwood's
propensity for making fun of things and of drafting a despatch to the
Colonial Office for Lord Milner in South Africa, beginning, 'With
reference to my able despatch of such and such a date.'

There is a strong suggestion, I think, of Raymond Asquith in the
character of Vernon Milburne in _The Dancing Floor_. Edward Leithen
first sees him at the Amysforts' ball. 'He was uncommonly handsome after
the ordinary English pattern. What struck me was his poise. He was
looking at the pretty spectacle with a curious aloofness--with eyes that
received much but gave out nothing. I have never seen anyone so
completely detached, so clothed with his own atmosphere.' In _Memory
Hold-the-Door_, again in the 'This for Remembrance' chapter, Buchan
speaks of Raymond Asquith, who was killed with the Grenadier Guards at
Givenchy, as he remembered him at Oxford: 'The figure of Raymond in
those days stands very clear in my memory, for he always had the
complete detachment from the atmosphere which we call distinction. . . .
His manner was curiously self-possessed and urbane, but there was
always in it something of a pleasant aloofness, as of one who was happy
in society but did not give to it more than a fraction of himself.'

To those who knew them there are doubtless many glimpses of his friends
in the gentlemen adventurers of whom he wrote--Hugh and Alan Dawnay,
Nelson, Sellar, and many others must have been drawn on.

There is certainly one living man whose life contributed to the saga.
Sir Richard Hannay, the leading character of the whole _Greenmantle_
series, the South African engineer who came to London in the fatal June
of 1914 and was fated to find _The Thirty-Nine Steps_, was born in
1877--Buchan himself was born in 1875. Hannay was a little older than a
man whose exploits were greatly to influence his life. The man was Sir
Edmund Ironside. Harold Nicholson reports[3] that at a review of the
First Canadian Division at Aldershot, the second Lord Tweedsmuir upon
being presented to Ironside told him that his father had based his
character of Sir Richard Hannay on the exploits of Ironside. Even here,
in a living man, it is fascinating to see the novelist's skill at work.
Hannay is not a photograph of Ironside--he is another man born four
years earlier, leading a different life. Ironside's fondness for playing
Patience in times of stress is not a quality of Hannay's, but is of his
American friend, John S. Blenkiron. Ironside speaking German and the
Taal of the veldt managed, during the Herero campaign of the Germans in
South-West Africa, to serve in disguise with the German Staff, and to
undergo the strain Hannay stood in _Greenmantle_ of serving with the
Germans as a Boer, ostensibly speaking only Dutch or Taal, while
understanding and mentally recording what the German Staff was saying in
its own language.

[Footnote 3: _Foreign Affairs_, _July_, 1940.]

However, if Hannay was Ironside in part, he was Buchan himself in many
ways, perhaps most of all in his purchase of Fosse Manor after the War,
when like Buchan 'the War left [him] with an intense craving for a
country life. It was partly that I wanted quiet after turmoil, the
instinct that in the Middle Ages took men into monasteries. But it was
also a new-found delight in the rhythm of nature, and in small homely
things after so many alien immensities.'

    *    *    *    *    *

Enough, however, of sources and parallels of character. These tales are
decidedly not romances _ la clef_, and we must leave surmise for their
realities. Beyond the plots and actions of the books, their essential
realities are the characters of the men and the scenes in which they
move.

It is in 1907 or 1908 that we first meet Edward Leithen, then a
philistine lawyer, telling a story to an ignoramus at twilight on a
Scotch hill.[4] It was a story of a mathematical genius named Hollond
who had stumbled on a theory of corridors in space constantly shifting
according to inexorable laws. The mathematics of the idea gradually
filled him with a sort of dynamic horror and he went out to Chamonix and
died at the Grpon, apparently after having gone up the Mummry crack by
himself. Leithen told the story at '"the eerie hour between dog and
wolf," as the French say.'

[Footnote 4: 'Space,' in _The Moon Endureth_.]

In the thirty years that follow we see Leithen on many occasions as the
man of action, but, although he himself can do spectacular things on the
Chamonix Aiguilles and outwalk a gillie in the Highlands, he is, of all
the group, the most sensitive to the presence of things unseen and to
the end that awaits all men. The hour between dog and wolf strikes often
for him. It is very interesting to see what J. W. Dunne, in his
_Experiment with Time_, twenty years later, did with the ideas that
Hollond was wrestling with, and through Dunne, J. B. Priestley's play
_Of Time and the Conways_ was influenced by Hollond.

Late in June, 1910, a Mr. Andrew Lumley died suddenly of heart failure
in the night in London, and there were two column obituaries about him
in _The Times_ and _The Post_. He was close on seventy and his death
revealed to the nation that he had been a second Maecenas. That autumn
at Glenaicill, where they had gone for the duck-shooting, Leithen told
five of his friends the story of _The Power House_. 'Since five in the
morning we had been out on the skerries, and had been blown home by a
wind which threatened to root the house and its wind-blown woods from
their precarious lodgment on the hill. A vast nondescript meal, luncheon
and dinner in one, had occupied us till the last daylight departed, and
we settled ourselves in the smoking-room for a sleepy evening of talk
and tobacco.'

The story has to do with the sudden unexplained flight of the rich
Charles Pitt-Heron from London to Bokhara and on to 'the roof of the
world [and] the snowy saddle of the pass which led to India.' His friend
Deloraine sets out after him. In London, however, lies the secret of his
flight, and by a chain of circumstances Leithen from his rooms in the
Temple has more to do with the rescue than Deloraine. After a motor
accident, while he is away from London on a brief trip, Leithen comes to
a house called High Ashes.

'The house, as seen in the half-light, was a long white-washed cottage,
rising to two storeys in the centre. It was plentifully covered with
creepers and roses, and the odour of flowers was mingled with the
faintest savour of wood-smoke pleasant to a hungry traveller in the late
hours. I pulled an old-fashioned bell, and the door was opened by a
stolid parlour-maid.'

Much of the unique charm of these tales is illustrated by this
paragraph. It might well have come out of _Cranford_ or _Mansfield
Park_. The 'old-fashioned bell' puts utter Victorian respectability on
the house. And in the house there is no sudden change. Cleaned and
refreshed, Leithen comes down to 'a library, the most attractive I think
I have ever seen . . . a table was laid in a corner, for the room was
immense, and the shaded candlesticks on it, along with the late June
dusk, gave such light as there was. . . . Dinner was a light meal but
perfect in its way. There were soles, I remember, an exceedingly
well-cooked chicken, fresh strawberries, and a savoury.' His host, 'a
very dignified and agreeable figure who greeted one in a voice so full
and soft that it belied his obvious age,' and Leithen 'talked of the
weather and the Hampshire roads.'

It is only after dinner, when the talk has broadened and deepened, that
Leithen noticed Mr. Lumley's eyes. 'His eyes were paler than I had ever
seen in a human head--pale, bright, and curiously wild.' Then in the
quiet June night Lumley begins the first of those marvellously prophetic
attacks on Civilisation, which all the evil conspirators of the romances
voice in one form or another.

'"Civilisation is a conspiracy. . . . Modern life is the silent compact
of comfortable folk to keep up pretences. And it will succeed till the
day comes when there is another compact to strip them bare. . . . A
little mechanical device will wreck your navies. A new chemical
combination will upset every rule of war. . . . One or two minute
changes might sink Britain to the level of Ecuador. And yet we never
think these things are possible. We think our castles of sand are the
ramparts of the universe. . . . The true knowledge, the deadly knowledge
is still kept secret." He quoted me one or two cases. . . . They were of
different kinds--a great calamity, a sudden break between two nations, a
blight on a vital crop, a war, a pestilence. . . . If he was right,
these things had not been the work of nature or accident, but of
devilish art. The nameless brains he spoke of, working silently in the
background, now and then showed this power by some cataclysmic
revelation. . . . "I only know of the existence of great extra-social
intelligences. They may be," Lumley says, "idealists and desire to make
a new world. . . . Civilisation knows how to use such powers as it has,
while the immense potentiality of the unlicensed is dissipated in
vapour. Civilisation wins because it is a world-wide league; its
enemies fail because they are parochial. But supposing anarchy learned
from civilisation and became international. Suppose that links in the
cordon of civilisation were neutralised by links in a far more potent
chain."'

This view of the world to come was written about at the time when Henry
Adams foresaw that at his centenary in 1938, 'for the first time since
man began his education among the carnivores, they would find a world
that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder.'

In May, four years later, a South African named Richard Hannay, with
enough money to have a good time, 'was the best bored man in the United
Kingdom.' But when he came back to his flat in Portland Place there was
a stranger named Scudder waiting for him. Hannay listened to his story
and on the strength of it gave him lodging for the night. He stayed
three days, gradually telling Hannay more of the doom that was hanging
over Europe. When Hannay came home to dinner the third night, Scudder
was lying skewered to the floor with a long knife through his heart. So
began the first of Hannay's hurried journeys: _The Thirty-Nine Steps_.
He sought refuge from police and the men who had killed Scudder in the
glens of Galloway, and there we begin to know this man of action. It is
not Hannay's courage and resource which most grip us. Other men down the
long roll from D'Artagnan have been as brave and resourceful in danger.
Other men have seen only down a narrow lane of duty. There are in
Hannay, however, two special qualities. He is in conflict with the
forces of evil. They are seeking to destroy a world in which he was
bored, but which he suddenly sees in its visible beauty, the beauty of
the face of England, and the austere beauty of Scotland. He sees the
'spring coming with every hill showing as clear as a cut amethyst. The
air had the queer rooty smell of bogs, but it was as fresh as mid-ocean,
and it had the strangest effect on my spirits. I actually felt
light-hearted. I might have been out for a spring holiday tramp, instead
of a man of thirty-seven, very much wanted by the police.' He is a man
for whom the heavens truly declare the glory of God. In all the perils
he faces for the twenty years we know him, he is always acutely affected
by the visible world. In Constantinople two years later all his
self-assurance comes back because 'the wind had gone to the south and
the snow was melting fast. There was a blue sky above Asia and away to
the north masses of white cloud drifting over the Black Sea. What had
seemed the day before the dingiest of cities now took on a strange
beauty, the beauty of unexpected horizons and tongues of grey water
winding below cypress-studded shores.' So it is till his last adventure
in the Norlands when he was so aware of 'the summer days when it was
never dark, the fresh, changing seas, the hardy delicate springs, the
roaring windy autumns, the long grey firelit winters.'

Then there is this other unexpected quality in a man of action. He feels
the terror of the hunted, the loneliness of the forsaken, and the sudden
waves of depression and surrender that all men know, and when it is time
to act he must, as he says, 'rake up the pluck to set my teeth and choke
back the horrid doubts that flood in on me.'

When he escapes from his pursuers in Scotland, he comes to a rendezvous
on the Kennet in Berkshire, where 'after Scotland the air smelled heavy
and flat but infinitely sweet, for there the limes and chestnuts and
lilac-bushes were domes of blossoms.' There he goes to the house of Sir
Walter Bullivant, of the Foreign Office, and tells him Scudder's
desperate story of what hangs over Europe, and his own perils and
escapes in Scotland, and as they talk a call comes through from London
saying that, as Scudder prophesied, Karolides has been assassinated.
Three weeks later England was at war.

The events of _Greenmantle_ begin in November, 1915, when Hannay was
convalescing from his wounds received at Loos the bloody twenty-fifth of
September. He was in a country house in Hampshire with Sandy Arbuthnot,
a brother officer, when a telegram from Bullivant summoned him to
London. There he hears a strange story of Germany's plans for a Holy War
in the Middle East. The details are slight. A muleteer had staggered
dying into the British camp at Kut, three months before. On a sheet of
paper had been written 'Kasredin,' 'Cancer,' 'V.I.' The dying muleteer
had been Bullivant's son, an intelligence officer of the Indian Army.
Hannay is asked to go in disguise through Germany to Constantinople to
learn the secret of the message.

He asks permission to bring Arbuthnot into the plan;[5] and with him
meets an American engineer, John Scantlebury Blenkiron. Arbuthnot, who
is an expert on the Near East, heads for Constantinople from Cairo,
where he goes as a King's Messenger. Blenkiron goes openly to Berlin as
a pro-German American, and Hannay decides to sail to Portugal and emerge
there as a Boer, speaking only Dutch. He sails as Cornelius Brandt. In
Lisbon he meets an old pal, Peter Pienaar, one of the great Dutch
hunters, who joins him and back through Rotterdam they go to Berlin.

[Footnote 5: Bullivant agrees, saying he was at Harrow with Arbuthnot's
father. Why the fifteenth Lord Clanroyden went to Harrow and Sandy, the
sixteenth Lord, to Eton is an interesting question.]

On the sixteenth day of January, 1916, the four make their rendezvous at
the Golden Horn with the secrets of Kasredin, Cancer, and V.I. in their
possession, the secrets of Germany's plan for a Holy War, of which a
woman, Hilda von Einem, is the inspiration and leader.[6] Hannay knew
nothing about women, 'but every man has in his bones a consciousness of
sex. I was shy and perturbed, but horribly fascinated. This slim woman,
poised exquisitely like some statue between the pillared lights, with
her fair cloud of hair, her long delicate face, and her pale bright
eyes, had the glamour of a wild dream. I hated her instinctively, hated
her intensely, but I longed to rouse her interest. To be valued coldly
by those eyes was an offence to my manhood, and I felt antagonism rising
within me.'

[Footnote 6: Hilda von Einem was not the last of the line to work for
the German Secret Service. The _New York Times_ of May 30, 1940, has the
following United Press despatch from Paris: 'The Seine Court Martial
today began trial _in absentia_ of the Baroness von Einem--the former
Reissa von Scheurnschloss--on charges of attempting to organize a fifth
column in France as personal emissary of German Propaganda Minister
Goebbels.']

Then, after the strain of the journey and cramped perils of
Constantinople, Hilda von Einem, believing their story, gives them
passports for Erzerum and the great hills. As they are about to go,
Sandy, who has insinuated himself into the von Einem's household,
disguised as a leader of a Senussi cult, makes one of his astoundingly
prophetic summaries of the Germans he is fighting and that England
fought again in 1939:

'Germany wants to simplify life, Germany's simplicity is that of the
neurotic, not the primitive. . . . She wants to destroy and simplify;
but it isn't the simplicity of the ascetic, which is of the spirit, but
the simplicity of the madman that grinds down all the contrivances of
civilisation to a featureless monotony. The prophet wants to save the
soul of his people, Germany wants to rule the inanimate corpse of the
world. . . .

'It was glorious to be out in the open again. Peter's face wore a new
look, and he sniffed the bitter air like a stag. There floated up from
the little wayside camps the odour of wood-smoke and dung-fires. That,
and the curious acrid winter smell of great wind-blown spaces will
always come to my memory as I think of that day.' They have learned the
plan and broken it. Hilda von Einem had tracked them to a kranz in the
hills. She offers them terms because of Sandy. She pleads there on the
hillside 'for his return, for his partnership in her great adventure,
pleading, for all I knew, for his love. Sandy says to her in English,
"You must know, Madam, that I am a British Officer."' He goes on that he
and his friends came East to destroy Greenmantle and her devilish
ambitions. She still pleads. 'Not a flicker of weakness or
disappointment marred her air.' Arbuthnot refused. She offers then to
save them all. 'Then she seemed to make a last appeal. She spoke in
Turkish now, and I do not know what she said, but I judged it was the
plea of a woman to her lover. Once more she was the proud beauty, but
there was a tremor in her pride--I had almost written tenderness. To
listen to her was like horrid treachery, like eavesdropping on something
pitiful.'

Then, as she turns from Arbuthnot's last refusal, a long-range Russian
shell explodes in a mushroom of red earth, and in a moment the man who
defeated her, whom she had brought to the edge of madness with her
wickedness, carried her light, dead body back and said, 'Dick, we must
bury her here. You see, she . . . liked me. I can make her no return but
this.'

They are in at the kill at Erzerum. The Grand Duke's Cossacks break
through the Turkish lines and Sandy in green silk as the Prophet rides
in their van into Erzerum, Hannay with a broken arm following in the
great press of riders.

'That was the great hour of my life and to live through it was worth a
dozen years of slavery. Great God! What an hour it was! Everything
flitted past me like smoke, or like the mad finale of a dream just
before waking. . . . I felt the shadows of the Palantuken glen fading,
and the great burst of light as we emerged on the wider valley.
Somewhere before us was a pall of smoke scarred with red flames, and
beyond, the darkness of still higher hills. . . . I felt the smell of
sheepskin and lathered horses, and above all the bitter smell of fire.
Down in the trough lay Erzerum, now burning in many places, and from the
east, past the silent forts, horsemen were closing in on it.'

This exaltation of victory, after the perils and prisons the adventurers
had been through, is that of Hannay, the man of action, Hannay brought
up on Walter Scott, but it is interesting to remember that such an
experience, that of leading his cavalry into burning Richmond the day
that Lee evacuated it, was also 'the great hour of his life' to so
different a man as Charles Francis Adams.

When Hannay is pulled out of the army next, for the adventures recounted
in _Mr. Standfast_, it is June, 1917, and he is a Brigadier in France
with a D.S.O. from the Somme, the C.B. for the Greenmantle business, and
the Legion of Honour. In the nine months that follow he is engaged in
tracking the German Secret Service through England, Scotland, Northern
France, Switzerland, and there is a wild twenty-four hours in Italy.
Arbuthnot was not with him. We learn years later[7] that he was in
Persia that winter, and though there is no confirmation of it, it is
probable that the frustration of Wassmuss,[8] the German T. E. Lawrence,
was Sandy's work. Blenkiron is with him, though, and two new people join
the great circle, Archie Roylance, the airman and ornithologist, and the
V.A.D., Mary Lamington. The story takes its name from the character that
Peter Pienaar has come to be. Absurdly over age, Pienaar had shaved his
beard, got into the Royal Flying Corps, and made a tremendous reputation
at the front. But in October, 1916, fighting his way back from the
German lines in a southwest gale, Pienaar had been brought down, much as
Bron Herbert was. At New Year's, in 1917, Hannay heard from him from
Switzerland, where he was interned, crippled for life.

[Footnote 7: _The Island of Sheep._]

[Footnote 8: _Wassmuss_, by Christopher Sykes. Longmans, Green and
Company, 1936.]

If everything else in the book were omitted, except those pages about
Peter Pienaar, no right-minded man or boy could read it without a sense
of the nobility of mankind. 'Somehow or other he had got a _Pilgrim's
Progress_, from which he seemed to extract enormous pleasure. . . . I
sensed what the loss of a leg must mean to him, for bodily fitness had
always been his pride. The rest of life must have unrolled itself before
him very drab and dusty to the grave. But he wrote as if he were on the
top of his power.'

We have already noted that it is not the adventures themselves which
make the whole _Greenmantle_ saga so notable, but rather the men
themselves and the scenes in which they move. In _Mr. Standfast_ there
is heart-chilling adventure, but the splendour of the book is its
picture of that greater love which leads men to lay down their lives for
a friend. The scenes in Switzerland, when Hannay as a spy goes to nurse
Peter Pienaar, are as moving as anything in literature, and I do not
know where literature holds a truer picture of the comradeship that
exists between men of mature years, after they have shared danger and
glory together and are ready, when the last adventure is done, for the
fireside, their pipes, and the memories of the days of their reckless
strength.

Pienaar in his crippled torture 'never had a word of complaint. That
was the ritual he had set himself, his point of honour, and he faced
the future with the same kind of courage as that with which he had
tackled a wild beast or Lensch himself. Only it needed a far bigger
kind of fortitude.... Once when I said something about his patience
he said he had got to try to live up to Mr. Standfast. He had fixed on
that character to follow, though he would have preferred Mr.
Valiant-for-Truth, if he had thought himeslf good enough.'

It is in this book that Hannay meets and falls in love with Mary
Lamington, almost twenty years his junior, but of that later. And it
is in this book that some of Buchan's dry humour is at its best, as
when Hannay, fleeing in disguise, falls in with some British soldiers
on leave and pretends to be drunk, 'knowing the infinite pity of the
British soldier for one so taken.' Lost on a lonely road with Archie
Roylance, they fear they are in the German lines until they hear a
soldier coming whistling down the road. 'That's an Englsihman,' said
Archie joyfully, 'No Boche could make such a beastly noise.'

In point of time the events of _The Dancing Floor_, which ends on
Easter Day, 1920, come next in the series. This is a story which
begins in January, 1913, and it is told by Sir Edward Leithen as he
comes home from a shooting holiday in North Ontario several years
later. On the frontispeice are quoted the words from the Aeneid,
_Quisque suos patimur manes_, Each of us suffers his own fate, which
is so important a part of the philosophy of these books.

In 1915 at the Amysforts' ball he meets Vernon Milburne, an Oxford
friend of his nephew, Charles. Vernon Milburne is the character so
reminiscent of Raymond Asquith. A close friendship begins between them
(for Leithen had 'a preposterous weakness for youth') although Leithen
was born in 1876 and Milburne, perhaps in 1892 or '93. Milburne tells
him of the strange dream he has had every year since childhood, and
out of that dream and the Easter myth in an Aegean island comes the
long and haunting story.

It will be remembered that Leithen says in _The Power House_ that
Ethel Pitt-Heron 'happened to be the only person that ever captured my
stony heart.' That was in 1910. In 1919 he meets the young and
fascinating Kor Arabin, and between Leithen and her, with over twenty
years' difference in their ages, there blossoms for a moment that
tender love between girl and mature man which so often fascinates both
and then falls away like the forsythia blooms in May. It is
fascinating to consider how marriage would have affected Leithen. He
was close to proposing it. She would almost certainly have accepted.
Leithen says himself, 'I could not get the girl from my thoughts. Her
face was rarely out of my mind with its arrogant innocence, its sudden
brilliances, and its as sudden languors. Her movements delighted me,
her darting grace, the insolent assurance of her carriage, and then,
without warning, the relapse into the child or the hoyden. We had
become the closest of friends, and friendship with Kor Arabin was a
dangerous pastime.' And then he adds, 'We were by way of dining with
the Lamanchas, and I think if we had met that evening I should have
asked her to marry me...but we did not meet, for by the evening she
was gone.'

When Leithen follows her to the Aegean and is able to save her from a
sacrifice, older than Christianity, he is able to watch Vernon Milburne
lying asleep beside her in Leithen's boat, and able to think of their
marriage quite calmly. But it is interesting to admirers of Leithen's
character that he never mentions Kor Arabin again and that for all the
depths and length of his friendship with Milburne he apparently never
saw him again after that Easter. Perhaps he thought it best for all
never to see either of them again.

It is not fair to the reader, I think, to pass any of these books
without mention of the weather Buchan loved so well. Leithen, early in
November, 1920, goes down to Wirlesdon.

'Is there anything in the world like the corner of a great pasture
hemmed in with smoky-brown woods in an autumn twilight, or the jogging
home after a good run when the moist air is quickening to frost and the
mud ruts are lemon-coloured in the sunset; or a morning in November
when, on some upland, the wind tosses the driven partridges like leaves
over tall hedges, through the gaps of which the steel-blue horizons
shine? _It is the English winter that intoxicates me even more than the
English May, for the noble bones of the land are bare, and you get the
essential savour of earth and wood and water._'

It is the next spring that we again meet Sir Richard Hannay. He has
married Mary Lamington and bought Fosse Manor, the home of her Wymondham
aunts where he met her in the opening event of _Mr. Standfast_. They
have a son Peter John 'rising fifteen months,' and after the turbulent
war years are settled down to the peace of the green heart of England.
The description of that life, in the first chapter of _The Three
Hostages_, as Hannay comes up through the fields in 'the cold pearly
haze at sunset' in mid-March, is one of the most delightful I know.

But as Lady Hannay comes downstairs to dinner with him, he feels a
little shiver run along her arm and she whispers, 'It's too good and
beloved to last. Sometimes I am afraid.' And then she quotes the Greek
word _Aidos_, meaning you must walk humbly and delicately to propitiate
the fates, that tabu, half-Calvinistic, half-Greek, which so many of
Buchan's characters feel.

It is too good and beloved to last. A summons comes to him for service
which he longs to refuse. He has every rational reason for refusing, but
he obeys it. In trying to rationalise his desire to refuse, Hannay
points out to himself and to others that he has earned the right to
rest; that it was one thing to respond to his country's call in war for
any service however distasteful, but that having served he has no
further obligations. The enormously wealthy American Jew, Mr. Julius
Victor, appeals to him 'as a Christian gentleman' for his help, and
Hannay says that during the War 'I was in the mood for any risk and my
wits were strung up and unnaturally keen. But that's all done with. I'm
in a different mood now and my mind is weedy and grass-grown.' So he
turns down appeals from three men, only, when they are gone, to
telegraph them that he will come.

This same decision to leave well-earned peace and rest for profitless
hazards is repeatedly made by the inner circle of the men in these
books. They are worldly men. If they are romantic, they are nonetheless
realists and I submit that it is their sense of realism rather than
their romanticism which affects their decisions.

They, all have great privileges. They are all spared the great disturber
of men's mental equilibrium. They are selfish and worldly, but they see
very clearly that their privileges can never be paid for completely and
balanced off. There are more instalments due. They cannot live with
themselves if they turn their backs on their obligation to pay with
their bodies for all that they possess. If they should refuse danger and
discomfort, then there is no meaning in the things they believe in.

In _The Three Hostages_, for the second time in peace we come on another
power house. Through the melodrama of the adventure, there is a grim
reality that seems even truer today. Medina, talking to his 'disciple'
Hannay in 1921, thinks curiously like another gangster of Berchtesgaden,
and the shudder that he sends through the capitals and markets of the
world, as Palliser-Yeates describes it in 'the dining-room in Mervyn
Street [as] the evening light shone with the candles on the table, and
made a fairy-like scene of the flowers and silver,' reads in detail like
the crises before and after Munich.

The tale has for me the best adventure of them all; it has the same
divine glimpses of weather, Hannay and Arbuthnot must fight against
powers of darkness not only outside, but those of fear and
discouragement within--but it is 1921, a year of peace, and it marks the
first awareness on their part that their war services were not
sufficient to pay for a lifetime of ease and comfort. They must
continue to pay.

In _The Three Hostages_, Medina, on several occasions, takes Hannay to
dine at The Thursday, a London dining club made up of fifteen men who
had been leading queer lives during the War and wanted to keep together.
The food and wine were at first execrable and Lord Lamancha gave it the
name of The Runagates Club from a line in the sixty-eighth Psalm, 'He
letteth the runagates continue in scarceness.' But under the firm hand
of the Duke of Burminster it got its own chef and rooms, and as the food
improved the name was changed to The Thursday.

There were, as we have said, fifteen members, of whom Medina, on the
strength of his exploits with Denikin in South Russia, was one. It was
proved that these exploits were frauds, and it may be supposed that he
was dropped from membership. In the volume _The Runagates Club_ twelve
members' after-dinner stories are recorded. One of these is Sir Richard
Hannay's and we may assume that he was elected in Medina's place. We
also know that Sandy Arbuthnot was a member, but we do not know the
names of the fourteenth and fifteenth members, and it would be
fascinating to know them. It would seem to me likely that MacGillivray
was one. I like to think that the fifteenth chair was saved for one who
probably never occupied it and who was to die splendidly on the Val
Saluzzana, 'loftily lying'--Colonel Melfort, _The Prince of the
Captivity_.

The main interest of _The Runagates Club's_ stories is in the last one,
'Fullcircle.' It is a delightful little story, about a late
seventeenth-century Cotswold house and its effect on some people who
lived there. But in the telling of it Sir Edward Leithen, speaking of
his own Tudor manor of Borrowby, says, "The people who built this sort
of thing lived close to another world and they thought bravely of
death--they had all poetry in them, and the heroic, and a great
unworldliness. They had marvellous spirits, and plenty of joys and
triumphs, but they had also their hours of black gloom. Their lives were
like our weather--storm and sun. One thing they never feared--Death. He
walked too near them all their days to be a bogey."

Leithen evidently said this in about 1923, and sixteen years later it
was to be wonderfully applicable to his own life.

Before discussing _John Macnab_, which is a very different type of
adventure from the others, a Buchan chronicler must fairly state the
confusion of dates which this book involves. The copyright of this book
is plainly 1925 and it appears just as plainly to record certain events
in Scotland between July and September, 1924. The Higher Criticism will,
however, just as plainly show that the copyright date of the book is an
error. The events it records occurred definitely from July to September,
1929. In _The Island of Sheep_, Peter John Hannay is indisputably in his
fourteenth year, which fixes the date as 1933. Lord Clanroyden clearly
refers to the events in _The Courts of the Morning_ as having been 'two
years ago,' namely, 1930-31. In _The Courts of the Morning_ Archibald
Roylance is on his honeymoon which occurred the winter after _John
Macnab_.

The story itself is a light and a delightful one, but it has three
important contributions to make to the whole saga. It gives us our only
full-length picture of the fascinating Charles Merkland, Lord Lamancha.
It introduces us to Janet Raden.

It should have warned us in its opening pages when Sir Edward Leithen
calls on the great specialist, Acton Croke, for what he calls _taedium
vitae_, that his pallor from an overdose of German gas, which we noted
in _The Runagates Club_, had a serious cause. Certainly Croke should
have been warned.

We have already noted an awareness, in _The Three Hostages_, of the
payment that had to be continually made for the privileges these men
enjoyed. In the quiet summer of _John Macnab_ three of the men, Sir
Edward Leithen, Pallister-Yeates, the banker, and Lord Lamancha went on
strike against the privileges themselves. Work and play had become too
easy, nothing was left remarkable beneath the visiting moon, and the
specialist, whom two of them consulted, said, 'You're secure and
respected and rather eminent--well, somehow or other get under the
weather. . . . You need to be made to struggle for your life again, your
life or your reputation.'

They meet Archie Roylance, the ex-airman and ornithologist, at dinner
and he suggests their coming to his house at Crask in the Highlands and
anonymously daring three neighbours of his to prevent their killing a
stag on two preserves and taking a salmon on the other's river. They
accept and the excitement of the poaching gives them back their zest.
How they do it is a fascinating story, and while they are doing it their
host, Roylance, meets and falls in love with Janet Raden, younger
daughter of Colonel Alastair Raden, one of their 'enemies.' She has some
clear-eyed things to say to Roylance who is standing for Parliament. She
tells him her sister and father are the very last of the Radens and that
is as it should be. 'The old life of the Highlands is going, and people
like ourselves must go with it. There's no reason why we should continue
to exist. We've long ago lost our justification. . . . We're only
survivals. . . . Our Gaelic motto was . . . "Sons of Dogs, come and I
will give you flesh." As long as we lived up to that we flourished, but
as soon as we settled down and went to sleep and became _rentiers_ we
were bound to decay. . . . Somehow the fire went out of their blood, and
they became vegetables. Their only claim was the right of property,
which is no right at all. . . . Nobody in the world today has a right to
anything which he can't justify. [My sister] Agatha adores decay--sad
old memories, and lost causes, and all the rest of it. I'm quite
different. I believe I'm kind, but I'm certainly hard-hearted.'

Now part of this, of course, is the restlessness of a lonely girl in the
Highlands for more life, but there is also in it that realism which I
find so redeeming in the men and women of these adventures. It is
interesting to the readers to see how frequently the women of the books
put into words the unexpressed creeds of their hard-bitten men.

During the poaching, Leithen makes friends with a wee laddie, Fish
Benjie, and Lord Lamancha with a dog, Bluidy Mackenzie, who has never
found anyone before who really understood him. There is a pleasant
picture of Leithen reading _Redgauntlet_ after he had got his salmon.
Toward the end the game begins to take a dangerous turn. Lord Lamancha
finds himself in a mean dilemma after his fist-fight with the navvy, Jim
Stokes. The end, of course, is happy, and it is very interesting that
the end is only happy because a vulgar and _nouveau_ lord, on whom and
on whose standards these fine gentlemen look down, suddenly reveals, in
very human fashion, an unsuspected fineness and a very saving canniness.

Janet Raden became Lady Roylance that November, and in the following
August she was staying at Laverlaw, Lord Clanroyden's[9]
sixteenth-century house[10] in the Borders, with her husband when Hannay
came up with a story of talk that their American friend, Blenkiron, was
in serious trouble and that something ought to be done about it. Sandy
dismissed the idea rather summarily and the more so when Janet said that
she had met a niece or cousin of Blenkiron, an American girl named
Dasent, who said she had been at Laverlaw that summer.

[Footnote 9: Sandy Arbuthnot had become the sixteenth Lord Clanroyden in
February.]

[Footnote 10: The dining-hall was part of the thirteenth-century keep.]

After Christmas the Roylances started for South America on their
honeymoon and a month later were dining at the Hotel de la Constituion
on a little promontory over the harbor of Olifa, with the Pacific
outside the windows. Their host, an Olifero, was telling them something
of that amazing republic, the country without problems or perhaps whose
problems had been solved by the vast mineral production of the Gran Seco
Province, and by its governor Castor, the actual dictator of the
country. Their host told them, though, that 'We have chosen prosperity
and the price we pay for it is our pride. Olifa is a well-nourished body
without a soul. . . . We have a stable government because our people
have lost interest in being governed.'

It had not always been so. When Castor, a European, emerged out of
nothing five years before, Olifa had lived all its life till then on the
edge of bankruptcy and revolution. He had wrought a miracle out of the
copper wealth of the Gran Seco.

The Roylances are eager to see the Gran Seco, but first they go fifty
miles by train and twenty-four by motor to the San Fuentes Ranch at
Veiro in the horse-country. The ranch is delightful, a mixture of
Newmarket and Scotland,[11] but a guest warns them after dinner to get
out of Olifa.

Back in Olifa City they meet Castor at dinner. He arranges their visit
to the almost forbidden Gran Seco, warning them that 'We have
established, as it were, a Sheffield and a Birmingham in a rude
hill-country, and we must limit our administrative problems.'

So they go. In a noisy crowd of American tourists Janet recognizes the
Dasent girl she had met in Scotland, and at their hotel, late at night,
Lord Clanroyden, dressed as a waiter, comes in. He tells them they must
leave the Gran Seco, that he needs their help in Olifa, that they must
meet Miss Dasent there. He doesn't know her Christian name.

[Footnote 11: One is reminded how everything about it would have
delighted Wilfred Scawen Blunt of all people.]

Barbara Dasent meets them at the San Fuentes Ranch. After dinner their
host Don Mario led the way to his sitting-room, where, according to
custom, a wood-fire crackled on the wide hearth. The curtains, usually
left untouched to reveal the luminous night, were now closely drawn.'
Clanroyden stood with his back to the fire.

He tells them why he is there and what he proposes to do. The world
today he says is stuffed with megalomania, with men who want to be
dictators, to deprive the world of its soul and rule its inanimate
corpse.[12] Castor is such a man. 'He will do any evil in order that
what he considers good may come.' Behind the placid front of Olifa City,
with the resources of the Gran Seco, this new Power House, 'this
greatest _agent provocateur_ in history,' is at work with the ultimate
purpose of making trouble on a vast scale for America, a country better
integrated in the Civil War even than now.

Blenkiron had first got on to Castor. After a very long time his agents
had reached Clanroyden. Now both of them propose to destroy Castor's
plan, to use his own strength to do it, by kidnapping him to head a
revolt against Olifa, and thereby to save his soul and Olifa's.

[Footnote 12: This was written in 1929.]

Very naturally the Roylances and Barbara Dasent ask Sandy why he is
doing this. He says this: 'I don't know. I think I would go on with this
affair, even if your uncle [Blenkiron] were out of it. You see, down at
the bottom of my heart I hate the things that Castor stands for. I hate
cruelty. I hate using human beings as pawns in a game of egotism. I hate
all rotten machine-made, scientific creeds. I loathe and detest all
this superman cant. I really believe in liberty, though it's out of
fashion.'

The Roylances agree to go in with him and he gives them a toast which
was to haunt Janet's dreams:

'I drink to our meeting in _The Courts of the Morning_.'

The story follows of the 'revolution' planned and successfully carried
out by Clanroyden, Blenkiron, the Roylances, Barbara Dasent, and Luis de
Marzaniga against the strength of Olifa's splendid mercenary army under
Lossberg.[13] Militarily it is accomplished by Sandy's superb genius in
selecting and applying to the terrain and the problem the principles of
three great captains--Montrose, Stonewall Jackson, and Lawrence of
Arabia--and it is done against terrific odds. The telling of it is one
of the longest and most engrossing of the romances. It is full of meat.

[Footnote 13: He commands an army fifteen years later in _The Holy
Terror_, by H. G. Wells.]

Aside from the unfailing fascination of Clanroyden's character, the
human situation most stirring in the book is the slow, convincing
discovery of his other self by Castor. Janet Roylance tells him 'Lord
Clanroyden is daring, but that is not because he thinks too much of
himself, but because he believes he has great allies.' Castor laughs as
she goes on,


    'Exultations, agonies
     And love, and man's unconquerable mind.'


But when Castor's conquistadors carry her off and Barbara expects to
find in him triumph, perhaps, or a cynical amusement, she finds a
haggard, suffering man in torment. He had suddenly become human,
terribly human.

There is a living scene between him and Barbara Dasent in which he
condemns Clanroyden, saying, 'He has started a fire which he cannot
control, and soon it will burn down his own house. His own house, I say.
He was a friend of Lady Roylance.' Barbara answers, 'So were you, I
think. Have you too not kindled a fire which you cannot control? The
conquistadors and the bodyguard were your own creation.'

Slowly through love and suffering he begins the stages of human wisdom,
_spernere mundum_, _spernere sese_, _spernere nullum_. 'I have gone
through the first stage. I have despised the world. I think I have
reached the second--I am coming to despise myself . . . and I am
afraid.' And as this develops, though the revolt is going badly, Sandy
is suddenly rallied from his fatigue and discouragement as Castor,
distracted with fear for Lady Roylance, says, 'I have had dreams and now
I am trampling on them.'

'You mean that?' Sandy asks. 'By God, then we cannot be beaten. We have
won the big stake.'

They do win it, and Clanroyden, El Lobo Gris, rides into Olifa at the
head of his battered commandos, and the multitude seemed to catch its
breath, as they saw the man who might be their king.

But before the triumph, in the night at the San Fuentes Ranch, Castor
had died splendidly to save Janet and old San Fuentes from the assassins
of his own bodyguard. Archie Roylance was not there as he lay dying in
Janet's arms. 'He was beyond speech and his eyes were vacant and
innocent like a child's. She pressed her face to his and kissed him on
the lips.'

When Archie came in ten minutes later, Sandy said to him gently: 'She is
safe--by a miracle. But Castor is dead--he died in her arms. Don't
disturb her yet, Archie. A woman can only love one man truly, but many
men may love her.' Then he tells him Castor died with her kiss on his
cheek and says to let her stay a little longer beside him.

At the end, when they want him to stay in Olifa, Sandy tells Janet how
full his mind is of home, 'the scent of the hay in the Oxford meadows,
the moor-burn and the peat reek in April . . . the beloved old musty
smell of the library at Laverlaw and logs crackling on a December
evening.' She tells him he is lonely. She speaks of Barbara Dasent and
he flushes under his sunburn, and Janet, her eyes wet with tears, kisses
him and sends him down the path to find her.

I think it was a wrench for both of them. Sandy says, a moment before,
'When Archie arrived [after Castor was killed] and his first cry was for
you, I remembered that I had nobody to feel like that about . . . and I
wanted someone--her--so badly.'

I cannot but feel that Sandy's love of Barbara Dasent and her marriage
to him arose from loneliness and the sense of the years slipping away
rather than anything more profound. He was not particularly suited to
marriage. Barbara was a good twenty years younger and his slave and, as
people say, much too good for him. But I think it might just as well
have been Janet or some other slim, boyish girl.

The tears in Janet's eyes, however, I do not see as entirely those of
happiness. A year before she had been a lonely younger daughter in a
Scottish home. She had met the charming Archie Roylance. He had been her
salvation. It is impossible not to like his irrepressible schoolboy
spirits and boyish charm.[14] He brought her into the great world and
the great circle--Clanroyden, Hannay, Leithen, Palliser-Yeates,
Lamancha--and I cannot but feel that this young woman, who described
herself as hard-hearted, while loving and honouring her gallant boyish
husband, must have sometimes mounted the Trojan walls and sighed her
soul toward the Grecian tents.

[Footnote 14: In _The Three Hostages_ someone took Archie Roylance to
see a Russian play which they told him was full of irony. The play
amazed him, as he thought irony was simply the tone your superior
officer used in addressing you.]

I place the opening of _The Gap in the Curtain_ in 1930, the year when
Easter fell on April 20, and Whitsunday was in June. Sir Edward Leithen
had gone down for Whitsunday to Flambard, the house with its Tudor wing,
'the remnant of the old house, which the great Earl of Essex once used
as a hunting-lodge.' Leithen was very tired--he was beginning to show
increasing signs of unusual fatigue--from a hard spring, and the size of
the house party rather depressed him. There was present, however, a
Professor Moe, a first-class mathematician and physicist, 'rather in the
Einstein way.' Moe was a dying man with a new theory of time. Lady
Flambard tried to explain it to Leithen--'He thinks that time is not a
straight line, but full of coils and kinks. He says that the Future is
here with us now, if we only knew how to look for it.'

For all his weariness and scepticism, Leithen was interested in the
great man and the experiment he proposed to try. Perhaps he was reminded
of the time over twenty years before when he had known Hollond, the
half-mad trifler with time who died on the Grpon. In any event he
agreed to participate in the experiment, when, four days later, on June
10, they would try, after a form of purification, to see for one instant
of time a newspaper of June 10 the next year. Five guests and himself
with Lady Flambard offered themselves. At the moment of revelation Moe
died, Lady Flambard fainted, distracting Leithen's attention, but five
other men saw the next year's paper.

Leithen tells us what they saw and what happened the next year. Two of
the men read their own death-notices and their stories are the most
significant. Each thought he had a year to live and each faced the
future bravely. One of them, Sir Robert Goodeve, had bravery without
fortitude and died shivering by a fire in his library at Goodeve, the
wonderful moated house in the Downs, of heart failure that came about by
the slow, relentless sapping fear. The other, Charles Ottery, was also
brave without fortitude and a fine career began to go to pieces under
his fright. With it went the inner life of his fiance, Pamela Brune,
Leithen's godchild. They meet, after their estrangement and dissipation,
at the Lamanchas' in Devonshire after Christmas. Pamela saw how ill and
broken Ottery looked. 'Oh, Charles,' she cried, 'what has happened to
us?' The word 'us' broke him down, 'and as they went down the road in
the winter gloaming, with the happy lights of the house in the valley
beneath them, he told her all.'

The next day at his rooms in Mount Street there followed as touching a
scene between two lovers as I know of. It is not a scene of passion or
even of high emotion, but it is one in which two valuable, unhappy human
beings, intensely needing each other, try to find a way out of the
tragedy that is closing in on them. _Dux femina facti._

'Courage is the thing,' Sir James Barrie began his famous Rectorial
address at Glasgow. It was only by courage, by adding fortitude to
bravery, doubtless because they had each other for its give-and-take,
that Death itself came to have no meaning. 'The ancient shadow
disappeared in the great brightness of love.'

In another of the stories, that of Mr. Reginald Daker, there is a scene
at Leriot, Lamancha's place on the Borders, that gives another of the
too few glimpses of Charles Merkland, Lord Lamancha. There are eight men
there for the shooting and Reggie Daker, the London dilettante, is
overwhelmed.

'You never saw such a set of toughs. Real hearties. . . . To listen to
them you would think it was a kind of disgrace to enjoy life at home as
long as there was some filthy place abroad where they could get malaria
and risk their necks. . . . They were such cocksure pagans--never
troubled to defend their views . . . the riddle of the Bramaputra gorges
. . . to penetrate the interior of New Guinea and climb Carstensz . . .
the second Everest expedition . . . birds in the frozen tundras of the
Yenesei . . . and Lamancha, the savage at Leriot who sighed for the
Arabian desert.'

In the opening of _The Island of Sheep_ Peter John Hannay is fourteen
years old. He was born in December, 1919, so that the book begins in the
fall of 1933. By Higher Criticism we have already fixed on the Roylance
marriage as November, 1929, and the Olifa incident as opening in 1930.
Our only question here is that in _The Island of Sheep_ Sandy refers to
Olifa as two years before--therefore, 1931, which I take it is the date
he left _The Courts of the Morning_ when it was all over.

Hannay's last recorded adventure begins on an October evening in 1933.
Old memories of past ardours and glories have been awakened by a speech
in the House. He is fifty-six years old and feels rather dismal about
the danger of petty degenerations of his soul. 'I had all the blessings
a man can have, but I wasn't earning them. I tried to tell myself that I
deserved a little peace and quiet, but I got no good from that
reflection, for it meant that I had accepted old age.'

In January he went down to the Hanham Flats in Norfolk for a few days'
goose-shooting with his son. That chapter, for men who love birds and
sea-marshes, the chill hunger of the hunter before dawn is one of the
most glorious ever written.[15] At the Rose and Crown at Hanham[16] they
meet a frightened, outlandish man. In March, back at Fosse, when the
Clanroydens are staying with them, Hannay speaks to Sandy of his feeling
of getting old and slack and of not deserving or earning his right to
all his comfort. Sandy tells him to enjoy his comforts 'but sit loose to
them,' and that night Sandy tells him a story of a man named Haraldsen
and a Tablet of Jade. This Haraldsen was a man whom Hannay had known in
Africa thirty years before. They had been through a weird adventure
together with a man named Lombard.

[Footnote 15: The boy of whom it is written was close to Buchan's heart
as readers of _Memory Hold-the-Door_ will quickly realise.]

[Footnote 16: It was at another inn at Hanham in _The Three Hostages_
that Greenslade met Medina.]

Lombard has meanwhile become a 'stockbroker and a commuter and bald and
plump and something in big business,' and next year he hoped to be a
Director of the Bank of England. Suddenly in the summer he wrote to
Hannay that he must see him, and when they lunched together in London he
reminded Hannay of an oath they had taken in Africa thirty years before
to stand by Haraldsen or come to his son's help should he ever need it.
Hannay himself calls it Moonlight Sonata stuff--and the story Lombard
tells him of a gang of London City sharpers trying to blackmail young
Haraldsen out of his great fortune makes him scoff. If it is anything
serious, Hannay says he will take a hand, but that Lombard with a big
business and a settled life has no call to answer. Lombard's answer is a
very interesting one.

Hannay meets Haraldsen's son. He is the frightened man he had met in the
autumn at Hanham. The story of threat and extortion rings true and he
brings the strangely scared viking to Fosse Manor. There gradually it
becomes evident that these blackmailers mean business, and in the blue
June weather Clanroyden comes down and hears the story. After dinner,
with young Peter John attending the council, Glenroyden tells them the
threat is very real and that leading it is D'Ingraville, one of Castor's
conquistadors, a dangerous and very desperate man, and those are not
words Sandy used lightly.

As the lines draw closer about Fosse, they find it necessary to move
Haraldsen secretly to Laverlaw--and to Haraldsen's plight we owe our
knowledge of that wonderful house and valley in the Borders where 'the
moorlands lap it round as the sea laps a rock.' There in 'the glen of
the Laver below us, with the house and its demesne like jewels in a
perfect setting and the far blue distances to the north,' both families
and Haraldsen are at peace, and fortitude begins to come back to the
frightened guest.

Like lightning in the quiet June, the gang strikes at Haraldsen's child,
a girl at school in England. Lombard, playing up wonderfully to the
tradition and training of his youth, rescues her. Then Haraldsen sees
some young shepherd dogs attack the old pack-leader and sees the dog
turn and fight. It reminds him of what he had forgotten. At Hanham he
had seen a goose escape a hawk by flying low. He had thought he might
escape by being quiet and humble. '. . . I was wrong, for humility
drains manhood away, but does not give safety. . . . I have been a
coward and I have seen the folly of cowardice. I have been sick too . .
. I will no longer avoid my danger, but go out to meet it, since it is
the will of God.'

The last round is fought on Haraldsen's Isle of Sheep in the Northern
Ocean near Iceland, Hannay, Lombard, Haraldsen, a boy and a girl--with
Clanroyden coming on. There they wait beleaguered in Haraldsen's vast
viking hall, only the rain, wind, and mists of the North between them
and their enemies. Haraldsen triumphs. He saves the life of Lord
Clanroyden. But he would assuredly have died, like Goodeve, or lived a
terrified and hunted man without the courage, the understanding, the
willingness to 'sit loose to comforts' which animated the two men who
became his friends. They were as MacCarthy said of Bron Herbert--'The
embodiment of the spirit which make mishaps and even grave misfortunes
more tolerable in their company.' _Amici usque!_

Now in _Sick Heart River_ comes the last canto of the dramatic poem in
many parts. It is another June, that of 1938. Sir Edward Leithen is
walking home to his rooms in Down Street from the House. He saw in
memory a London of forty and of twenty-five years before.[17] The West
London that he was actually passing through is now no more. He thinks of
'how many snowy winter nights he had known there, cheerful with books
and firelight; and autumn twilights when he was beginning to get in the
stride after the long vacation; and spring mornings when the horns of
elfland were blowing even in Down Street.'

Leithen had been told that day, by Acton Croke, whom he saw before the
Macnab adventure, that he was dying, slowly dying--a year, perhaps a
little longer, and then the end. Life had been a cup running over.

[Footnote 17: I was reminded as I read this of a similar walk of Maurice
Baring's in _The Puppet Show of Memory_, when he 'saw all the beauties
of England in their lovely teens.']

In the dawn of the next day he realised he wanted only one more thing
from life, to 'die standing, as Vespasian said an emperor should.'

That morning Blenkiron brings him the chance to die standing and he
takes it. He is asked to find a man of great value who has disappeared
from the financial world of New York and gone completely over the
horizon. New York is the beginning of the long journey. There Leithen
meets Bronson Jane, and Savory, the Yale classical scholar with the
hunting squire's appearance. One must regret that he had no earlier
opportunity to know them because in their brief acquaintance there are
seeds of the friendship he had with the great circle he had left in
England.

The hunt goes out into the unknown North, with Leithen gambling his
failing strength of body against wind and weather across the Manitoba
lakes, Great Slave Lake to Ghost River inside the Circle, until he looks
on the Arctic Ocean. It affected Leithen as the sight of the mouth of
the Mackenzie did Buchan. 'It was like no ocean he had ever seen, for it
seemed to be without form or reason. The tide licked the shore without
purpose. It was simply water filling a void, a tremendous deathly waste,
pale like a snake's belly. A thing beyond humanity and beyond time.'

That is not the end. The bitter trail is beaten on to the Sick Heart
River, Rivire de Coeur Malade, across the Yukon watershed. There waters
of atonement are thought to flow, and now the search for a man has
become something far greater.

Professor Hocking, when he was delivering his valedictory lecture at
Yale before going to Harvard, was asked to define Beauty. He answered
quickly: "Beauty, I believe, is one means of anticipating the
achievement which all of us hope for at the further end of eternity--the
complete subjugation of matter to the uses and ends of the spirit. Here
in what is beautiful we see that attainment before our eyes and its
presence sustains us in the long journey."

It is this beauty which Leithen finds that he has gone out to seek. He
is sustained in the long journey first by his 'noble frosty egoism,' and
then by the sudden over-powering realisation that all men, great and
small, must strive _sub specie aeternitatis_, and at last very humanly
by the thought of reunion with his friends in England, 'Lamancha on the
long slopes of Cheviot, Roylance on the wind-blown thymy moors of the
west, Sandy in his Border fortress, Hannay (half Nestor, half Odysseus)
by the clear streams and gentle pastures of Cotswold.' His heart
remembers how!

If someone were to ask me what makes these books most fascinating to me,
I think I should say their prophecy, their scenes, their men, their
houses. In the first adventure beginning definitely after the War,
Greenslade says, 'There has never been such a chance for a rogue since
the world began.' In the same book Sandy says, at The Thursday, 'The
real magician, if he turned up today, wouldn't bother about drugs and
dopes. He would dabble in far more deadly methods, the compulsion of a
fiery nature over the limp things that men call their minds.' This was
written in 1924. But what Sandy says then Lumley was saying in effect in
1910 and Castor in 1931, and finally when Hitler said it the world
accepted it. Buchan seems to have foreseen in amazing clairvoyance the
gangster-rule of the world--Lumley, von Einem, von Schwabing, Medina,
Castor, all propose and to a degree succeed in what Hitler has done so
thoroughly.

I have tried by quotation to give some idea of Buchan's gift for weather
and landscape, yet one of the joys of the books is to open them and find
another morning, another moor, sea, or mountain seen and described with
the delight with which Shakespeare saw Warwickshire in his youth.

What makes the men so memorable is of course not their bravery or
competence. Their moments of exhilaration are followed by very human
moments of fright, nor are they impeccable. Hannay himself knows there
is an 'unworthy sense of superiority which a man gets from seeing an old
friend whom he greatly admires behave rather badly.' They 'sit loose to
their comforts,' it is true, and they recognise there is no final right,
but that rights must continue to be earned. Their creed is 'mirthful and
grave, stalwart and merciful.' The social philosopher will of course say
that all that is very easy for them. After all, they have all been
spared the three main disturbers of man's mental equilibrium--the
problem of money does not exist for them; they are involved in the
complex of problems centring about parents and family; they are spared
the torments of sexual jealousy. Hannay has a flash of it after his
engagement to Mary Lamington in Paris in February, 1918, but his
marriage, Clanroyden's, Roylance's, and Lamancha's,[18] are all idyllic
and Leithen's heart, though it lights up on four occasions for a lady,
does so with no more than 'a dim tenderness.'

[Footnote 18: See _The Prince of the Captivity_.]

It would be a mistake, I believe, to conclude from this that Buchan was
not aware of the fierceness with which men and women beat upon each
other to the grave. Hilda von Einem's death-speech to Sandy comes from
the dark abysses, and Janet Roylance is stricken at Castor's death with
the same numb helplessness as Anna Karenina when Vronsky falls in the
steeplechase, and she must cloak her anguish from the watching crowd.
Buchan's attitude in matters of sex is that of his hero, Sir Walter
Scott, but in that connection Buchan quotes in his _Sir Walter Scott_ a
marvellously telling passage from _The Antiquary_ as evidence that Scott
is not unaware of the dark secrets of memory.

The braves of the tales are unquestionably worldlings in every sense of
the word. Much can be said against their way of life. It would have been
impossible without the sweat and labour of less fortunate men. But the
world would be a poorer and more evil place without them. What one of
their houses, Bullivant's place on the Kennet, High Ashes, Fosse Manor,
Laverlaw, Machray, the San Fuentes Ranch, would anyone not like to live
in? So it is with them.

When the gates close on Christian's glimpse of the New Jerusalem, he
says very simply, 'Which when I had seen I wished myself among them.'

There is nothing better or truer to say of the scenes, and the men and
women of these adventures.

                                                       HOWARD SWIGGETT



Part One


THUS SAID ALFRED:

    IF THOU HAST A WOE TELL IT NOT TO THE WEAKLING,
    TELL IT TO THY SADDLE-BOW, AND RIDE SINGING FORTH.

                                    PROVERBS OF ALFRED


Leithen had been too busy all day to concern himself with the thoughts
which hung heavily at the back of his mind. In the morning he had
visited his bankers to look into his money affairs. These were
satisfactory enough; for years he had been earning a large income and
spending little of it; his investments were mostly in trustee stocks; he
found that he possessed, at a safe computation, a considerable fortune,
while his Cotswold estate would find a ready sale. Next came his
solicitors, for he was too wise a man to make the mistake of many
barristers and tinker with his own will. He gave instructions for
bringing the old one up to date. There were a few legacies by way of
mementoes to old friends, a considerable gift to his college, donations
to certain charities, and the residue to his nephew Charles, his only
near relation.

He forced himself to lunch at one of his clubs, in a corner where no one
came near him, though Archie Roylance waved a greeting across the
dining-room. Then he spent a couple of hours with his clerk in his
Temple chambers, looking through the last of his briefs. There were not
a great many, since, for some months, he had been steadily refusing
work. The batch of cases for opinion he could soon clear off, and one
big case in the Lords he must argue next week, for it involved a point
of law in which he had always taken a special interest. The briefs for
the following term would be returned. The clerk, who had been with him
for thirty years, was getting on in life and would be glad to retire on
an ample pension. Still, it was a painful parting.

'It's a big loss to the Bar, Sir Edward, sir,' old Mellon said, 'and
it's pretty well the end of things for me. You have been a kind master
to me, sir, and I'm proud to have served you. I hope you are going to
have many happy years yet.'

But there had been a look of pain in the old man's eyes which told
Leithen that he had guessed what he dared not hint at.

He had tea at the House of Commons with the Chief Whip, a youngish man
named Ritson, who in the War had been a subaltern in his own battalion.
Ritson listened to him with a wrinkled brow and troubled eyes.

'Have you told your local people?' he asked.

'I'll write to them tomorrow. I thought I ought to tell you first.
There's no fear of losing the seat. My majority has never been less than
six thousand, and there's an excellent candidate ready in young
Walmer.'

'We shall miss you terribly, you know. There's no one to take your
place.'

Leithen smiled. 'I haven't been pulling my weight lately.'

'Perhaps not. But I'm thinking of what's coming. If there's an election,
we're going to win all right, and we'll want you badly in the new
Government. It needn't be a law office. You can have your pick of half a
dozen jobs. Only yesterday the Chief was speaking to me about you.' And
he repeated a conversation he had had with the man who would be the next
Prime Minister.

'You're all very kind. But I don't think I want anything. I've done
enough, as Napoleon said, "pour chauffer la gloire."'

'It is your health?' Ritson asked.

'Well, I need a rest. I've been pretty busy all my days, and I'm tired.'

The Chief Whip hesitated.

'Things are pretty insecure in the world just now. There may be a crisis
any day. Don't you think you ought----'

Leithen smiled.

'I've thought of that. But if I stayed on I could do nothing to help.
That isn't a pleasant conclusion to come to, but it's the truth.'

Ritson stood at the door of his room and watched his departing guest
going down the corridor to the Central Lobby. He turned to a junior
colleague who had joined him--

'I wonder what the devil's the matter! There's been a change in him in
the last few months. But he doesn't look a sick man. He was always a bad
colour, of course, but Lamancha says he is the hardest fellow he ever
knew on the hill.'

The other shook a wise head. 'You never can tell. He had a roughish time
in the War and the damage often takes years to come out. I think he's
right to slack off, for he must have a gruelling life at the Bar. My
father tried to get him the other day as leader in a big case, and he
wasn't to be had for love or money. Simply snowed under with work!'

Leithen walked from the House towards his rooms in Down Street. He was
still keeping his thoughts shut down, but in spite of himself the
familiar streets awakened memories. How often he had tramped them in the
far-off days when he was a pupil in chambers and the world was an oyster
waiting to be opened! It was a different London then, quieter, cosier,
dirtier perhaps, but sweeter-smelling. On a summer evening such as this
the scents would have been a compound of wood paving, horse-dung,
flowers, and fresh paint, not the deadly monotony of petrol. The old
landmarks, too, were disappearing. In Saint James's Street only Mr.
Lock's modest shop-window and the eighteenth-century faade of Boodle's
recalled the London of his youth. He remembered posting up this street
with a high heart after he had won his first important case in court . .
. and the Saturday afternoons' strolls in it when he had changed his
black regimentals for tweeds or flannels . . . and the snowy winter day
when a tiny coffin on a gun carriage marked the end of Victoria's reign
. . . and the shiny August morning in 1914 when he had been on his way
to enlist with a mind half-anxious and half-exulting. He had travelled a
good deal in his time, but most of his life had been spent in this
square mile of West London. He did not regret the changes; he only noted
them. His inner world was crumbling so fast that he had lost any craving
for permanence in the externals of life.

In Piccadilly he felt his knees trembling and called a taxi. In Down
Street he took the lift to his rooms, though for thirty years he had
made a ritual of climbing the stairs.

The flat was full of powdery sunlight. He sank into a chair at the
window to get his breath, and regarded the comfortable, shabby
sitting-room. Now that he seemed to be looking at it with new eyes he
noted details which familiarity had long obscured. The pictures were
school and college groups, one or two mountain photographs, and, over
the mantelpiece, Raeburn's portrait of his grandfather. He was very
little of a connoisseur, though at Borrowby he had three Vandykes which
suited its Jacobean solemnity. There were books everywhere; they
overflowed into the dining-room and his bedroom and the little hall. He
reflected that what with these, and the law library in his chambers, and
his considerable collection at Borrowby, he must have at least twenty
thousand volumes. He had been happy here, happy and busy, and for a
moment--for a moment only--he felt a bitter pang of regret.

But he was still keeping his thoughts at a distance, for the time had
not come to face them. Memories took the vacant place. He remembered how
often he had left these rooms with a holiday zest, and how he had
always returned to them with delight, for this, and not Borrowby, was
his true home. How many snug winter nights had he known here, cheerful
with books and firelight; and autumn twilights when he was beginning to
get into the stride of his work after the long vacation; and spring
mornings when the horns of elfland were blowing even in Down Street! He
lay back in his chair, shut his eyes, and let his memory wander. There
was no harm in that, for the grim self-communion he had still to face
would have no room for memories. He almost dozed.

The entry of his man, Cruddock, aroused him.

'Lord Clanroyden called you up, sir. He is in Town for the night and
suggests that you might dine with him. He said the Turf Club at eight. I
was to let him know, sir.'

'Tell him to come here instead. You can produce some kind of dinner?'
Leithen rather welcomed the prospect. Sandy Clanroyden would absorb his
attention for an hour or two and postpone for a little the settlement
with himself which his soul dreaded.

He had a bath and changed. He had been feeling listless and depressed,
but not ill, and the cold shower gave him a momentary sense of vigour
and almost an appetite for food. He caught a glimpse of himself naked in
the long mirror, and was shocked anew by his leanness. He had given up
weighing himself, but it looked as if he had lost pounds in the past
month.

Sandy arrived on the stroke of eight. Leithen, as he greeted him,
reflected that he was the only one of his closer friends whom he could
have borne to meet. Archie Roylance's high spirits would have been
intolerable, and Lamancha's air of mastery over life, and Dick Hannay's
serene contentment.

He did not miss the sharp glance of his guest when he entered the room.
Could some rumours have got abroad? It was clear that Sandy was setting
himself to play a part, for his manner had not its usual ease. He was
not talking at random, but picking his topics.

A proof was that he did not ask Leithen about his holiday plans, which,
near the close of the law term, would have been a natural subject. He
seemed to feel that his host's affairs might be delicate ground, and
that it was his business to distract his mind from some unhappy
preoccupation. So he talked about himself and his recent doings. He had
just been to Cambridge to talk to the Explorers' Club, and had come back
with strong views about modern youth.

'I'm not happy about the young entry. Oh! I don't mean all of it.
There's plenty of lads that remind me of my own old lot. But some of the
best seem to have become a bit too much introverted--isn't that the
filthy word? What's to be done about the owlish young, Ned?'

'I don't see much of youth nowadays,' said Leithen. 'I seem to live
among fogies. I'm one myself.'

'Rot! You are far and away the youngest of us.'

Again Leithen caught a swift glance at his face, as if Sandy would have
liked to ask him something, but forbore.

'Those boys make me anxious. It's right that they should be serious,
with the world slipping into chaos, but they need not be owlish. They
are so darned solemn about their new little creeds in religion and
politics, forgetting that they are all as old as the hills. There isn't
a ha'porth of humour in the bunch, which means, of course, that there
isn't any perspective. If it comes to a showdown, I'm afraid they will
be pretty feeble folk. People with half their brains and some sense of
humour will make rings round them.'

Leithen must have shown his unconcern about the future of the world by
his expression, for Sandy searched for other topics. Spring at Laverlaw
had been diviner than ever. Had Leithen heard the curlews this year? No?
Didn't he usually make a pilgrimage somewhere to hear them? For
Northerners they, and not the cuckoo, were the heralds of spring . . .
His wife was at Laverlaw, but was coming to London next day. Yes, she
was well, but----

Again Leithen saw in the other's face a look of interrogation. He wanted
to ask him something, tell him something, but did not feel the moment
propitious.

'Her uncle has just turned up here. Apparently there's a bit of family
trouble to be settled. You know him, don't you? Blenkiron--John
Scantlebury Blenkiron?'

Leithen nodded. 'A little. I was his counsel in the Continental Nickel
case some years ago. He's an old friend of yours and Hannay's, isn't
he?'

'About the best Dick and I have in the world. Would you like to see him
again? I rather think he would like to see you.'

Leithen yawned and said his plans for the immediate future were
uncertain.

Just before ten Sandy took his leave, warned by his host's obvious
fatigue. He left the impression that he had come to dinner to say
something which he had thought had better be left unsaid, and Leithen,
when he looked at his face in his dressing-table mirror, knew the
reason. It was the face of a very sick man.

That night he had meant, before going to sleep, to have it out with
himself. But he found that a weary body had made his brain incapable of
coherent thought, so he tumbled into bed.




2


The reckoning came six hours later, when his bedroom was brightening
with the fore-glow of a June dawn. He awoke, as he usually did nowadays,
sweating and short of breath. He got up and laved his face with cold
water. When he lay down again he knew that the moment had arrived.

Recent events had been confused in a cloud of misery, and he had to
disengage the details. . . . There was no one moment to which he could
point when his health had begun to fail. Two years before he had had a
very hard summer at the Bar, complicated by the chairmanship of a Royal
Commission, and a trip to Norway for the August sea-trout had been
disastrous. He had returned still a little fatigued. He no longer got up
in the morning with a certain uplift of spirit, work seemed duller and
more laborious, food less appetising, sleep more imperative but less
refreshing.

During that winter he had had a bout of influenza for the first time in
his life. After it he had dragged his wing for a month or two, but had
seemed to pick up in the spring when he had had a trip to Provence with
the Clanroydens. But the hot summer had given him a setback, and when he
went shooting with Lamancha in the autumn he found to his dismay that he
had become short of breath and that the hills were too steep for him.
Also he was clearly losing weight. So on his return to London he sought
out Acton Croke and had himself examined. The great doctor had been
ominously grave. Our fathers, he said, had talked unscientifically about
the 'grand climacteric,' which came in the early sixties, but there was
such a thing as a climacteric which might come any time in middle life,
when the physical powers adjusted themselves to the approach of age.
That crisis Leithen was now enduring, and he must go very carefully and
remember that the dose of gas he got in the War had probably not
exhausted its effect. Croke put him on a diet, prescribed a certain
routine of rest and exercise, and made him drastically cut down his
engagements. He insisted also on seeing him once a fortnight.

A winter followed for Leithen of steadily declining health. His breath
troubled him and a painful sinking in the chest. He rose languidly,
struggled through the day, and went to bed exhausted. Every moment he
was conscious of his body and its increasing frailty. Croke sent him to
a nursing home during the Christmas vacation, and for a few weeks he
seemed to be better. But the coming of spring, instead of giving him new
vigour, drained his strength. He began to suffer from night sweats
which left him very feeble in the morning. His meals became a farce. He
drove himself to take exercise, but now a walk round the Park exhausted
one who only a few years back could walk down any Highland gillie.
Croke's face looked graver with each visit.

Then the day before yesterday had come the crisis. He went by
appointment to Croke and demanded a final verdict. The great doctor gave
it: gravely, anxiously, tenderly, as to an old friend, but without
equivocation. He was dying, slowly dying.

Leithen's mind refused to bite on the details of his own case with its
usual professional precision. He was not interested in these details. He
simply accepted the judgment of the expert. He was suffering from
advanced tuberculosis, a retarded consequence of his gas-poisoning.
Croke, knowing his patient's habit of mind, had given him a full
diagnosis, but Leithen had scarcely listened to his exposition of the
chronic fibrous affection and broncho-pulmonary lesions. The fact was
enough for him.

'How long have I to live?' he asked, and he was told a year, perhaps a
little longer.

'Shall I go off suddenly, or what?' The answer was that there would be a
progressive loss of strength until the heart failed.

'You can give me no hope?'

Croke shook his head.

'I dare not. The lesions _might_ heal, the fibrous patches _might_
disappear, but it would be a miracle according to our present knowledge.
I must add, of course, that our present knowledge may not be final
truth.'

'But I must take it as such. I agree. Miracles don't happen.'

Leithen left Harley Street almost cheerfully. There was a grim
satisfaction in knowing the worst. He was so utterly weary that after
coffee and a sandwich in his rooms he went straight to bed.

Soon he must think things out, but not at once. He must first make some
necessary arrangements about his affairs which would keep him from
brooding. That should be the task of the morrow. It all reminded him of
his habit as a company commander in the trenches when an attack was
imminent; he had busied himself with getting every detail exact, so that
his mind had no time for foreboding . . .

As he lay watching his window brighten with the morning, he wondered why
he was taking things so calmly. It was not courage--he did not consider
himself a brave man, though he had never greatly feared death. At the
best he had achieved in life a thin stoicism, a shallow fortitude.
Insensibility, perhaps, was the best word. He remembered Doctor
Johnson's reply to Boswell's 'That, sir, was great fortitude of
mind.'--'No, sir, stark insensibility.'

At any rate, he would not sink to self-pity. He had been brought up in a
Calvinistic household and the atmosphere still clung to him, though in
the ordinary way he was not a religious man. For example, he had always
had an acute sense of sin, which had made him something of a Puritan in
his way of life. He had believed firmly in God, a Being of ineffable
purity and power, and consequently had had no undue reverence for man.
He had always felt his own insignificance and imperfections and was not
inclined to cavil at fate. On the contrary, he considered that fortune
had been ludicrously kind to him. He had had fifty-eight years of health
and wealth. He had survived the War, when the best of his contemporaries
had fallen in swathes. He had been amazingly successful in his
profession and had enjoyed every moment of his work. Honours had fallen
to him out of all proportion to his merits. He had had a thousand
pleasures--books, travel, the best of sport, the best of friends.

His friends--that had been his chief blessing. As he thought of their
warm companionship he could not check a sudden wave of regret. _That_
would be hard to leave. He had sworn Acton Croke to secrecy, and he
meant to keep his condition hidden even from his closest intimates--from
Hannay and Clanroyden and Lamancha and Palliser-Yeates and Archie
Roylance. He could not endure to think of their anxious eyes. He would
see less of them than before, of course, but he would continue to meet
them on the old terms. Yes--but how? He was giving up Parliament and the
Bar--London, too. What story was he to tell? A craving for rest and
leisure? Well, he must indulge that craving at a distance, or otherwise
his friends would discover the reason.

But where . . . Borrowby? Impossible, for it was associated too closely
with his years of vigour. He had rejoiced in reshaping that ancient
shell into a home for a green old age; he remembered with what care he
had planned his library and his garden; Borrowby would be intolerable as
a brief refuge for a dying man . . . Scotland?--somewhere in the Lowland
hills or on the sounding beaches of the west coast? But he had been too
happy there. All the romance of childhood and forward-looking youth was
bound up with those places and it would be agony to revisit them.

His memory sprawled over places he had seen in his much-travelled life.
There was a certain Greek island where he had once lived dangerously;
there were valleys on the Italian side of the Alps, and a _saeter_ in
the Jotunheim to which his fancy had often returned. But in his survey
he found that the charm had gone from them; they were for the living,
not the dying. Only one spot had still some appeal. In his early youth,
when money had not been plentiful, he had had an autumn shooting trip in
northern Quebec because it was cheap. He had come down on foot over the
height of land, with a single Montagnais guide, back-packing their kit,
and one golden October afternoon he had stumbled on a place which he had
never forgotten. It was a green saddle of land, a meadow of wild hay
among the pines. South from it a stream ran to the St. Lawrence; from an
adjacent well another trickle flowed north on the Arctic watershed. It
had seemed a haven of pastoral peace in a shaggy land, and he recalled
how loath he had been to leave it. He had often thought about it, often
determined to go back and look for it. Now, as he pictured its green
security, it seemed the kind of sanctuary in which to die. He
remembered its name. The spring was called Clairefontaine, and it gave
its name both to the south-flowing stream and to a little farm below in
the valley.

Supposing he found the proper shelter, how was he to spend his closing
months? As an invalid, slowly growing feebler, always expectant of
death? That was starkly impossible. He wanted peace to make his soul,
but not lethargy either of mind or body. The body!--that was the rub. It
was failing him, that body which had once been a mettled horse quickly
responding to bridle or spur. Now he must be aware every hour of its
ignoble frailty . . . He stretched out his arms, flexing the muscles as
he used to do when he was well, and was conscious that there was no pith
in them.

His thoughts clung to this physical shell of his. He had been proud of
it, not like an athlete who guards a treasure, but like a master proud
of an adequate servant. It had added much to the pleasures of life . . .
But he realised that in his career it had mattered very little to him,
for his work had been done with his mind. Labouring men had their
physical strength as their only asset, and when the body failed them
their work was done. They knew from harsh experience the limits of their
strength, what exhaustion meant, and strife against pain and
disablement. They had to endure all their days what he had endured to a
small degree in the trenches . . . Had he not missed something, and,
missing it, had failed somehow in one of the duties of man?

This queer thought kept returning to him with the force of a revelation.
His mood was the opposite of self-pity, a feeling that his life had
been too cosseted and fur-lined. Only now that his body was failing did
he realise how little he had used it . . . Among the oddly assorted
beliefs which made up his religious equipment one was conditional
immortality. The soul was only immortal if there was such a thing as a
soul, and further existence had to be earned in this one. He had used
most of the talents God had given him, but not all. He had never, except
in the War, staked his body in the struggle, and yet that was the stake
of most of humanity. Was it still possible to meet that test of manhood
with a failing body? . . . If only the War were still going on!

His mind, which had been dragging apathetically along, suddenly awoke
into vigour. By God, there was one thing that would not happen! He would
not sit down and twiddle his thumbs and await death. His ship, since it
was doomed, should go down in action with every flag flying. Lately he
had been re-reading _Vanity Fair_ and he remembered the famous passage
where Thackeray moralises on the trappings of the conventional deathbed,
the soft-footed nurses, the hushed voices of the household, the alcove
on the staircase in which to rest the coffin. The picture affected him
with a physical nausea. That, by God! should never be his fate. He would
die standing, as Vespasian said an emperor should . . .

The day had broadened into full sunlight. The white paint and the
flowered wallpaper of his bedroom glowed with the morning freshness, and
from the street outside came pleasant morning sounds like the jingle of
milk-cans and the whistling of errand boys. His mind seemed to have
been stabbed awake out of a flat stoicism into a dim but masterful
purpose.

He got up and dressed, and his cold bath gave him a ghost of an appetite
for breakfast.




3


His intention was to go down to his chambers later in the morning and
get to work on the batch of cases for opinion. As always after a meal,
he felt languid and weak, but his mind was no longer comatose. Already
it was beginning to move steadily, though hopelessly, towards some kind
of plan. As he sat huddled in a chair at the open window, Cruddock
announced that a Mr. Blenkiron was on the telephone and would like an
appointment.

This was the American that Sandy Clanroyden had spoken of. Leithen
remembered him clearly as his client in a big case. He remembered much
that he had heard about him from Sandy and Dick Hannay. One special
thing, too--Blenkiron had been a sick man in the War and yet had put up
a remarkable show. He had liked him, and, though he felt himself now cut
off from human companionship, he could hardly refuse an interview for
Sandy's sake. The man had probably some lawsuit in hand, and, if so, it
would not take long to refuse.

'If convenient, sir, the gentleman could come along now,' said Cruddock.

Leithen nodded and took up the newspaper.

Blenkiron had aged. Eight years ago Leithen recalled him as a big man
with a heavy shaven face, a clear skin, and calm, ruminant grey eyes. A
healthy creature in hard condition, he could have given a good account
of himself with his hands as well as his head. Now he was leaner and
more grizzled, and there were pouches under his eyes. Leithen remembered
Sandy's doings in South America; Blenkiron had been in that show, and he
had heard about his being a sort of industrial dictator in Olifa, or
whatever the place was called.

The grey eyes were regarding him contemplatively but keenly. He wondered
what they made of his shrunken body.

'It's mighty fine to see you again, Sir Edward. And all the boys, too.
I've been stuck so tight in my job down South that I've got out of touch
with my friends. I'm giving myself a holiday to look them up and to see
my little niece. I think you know Babs.'

'I know her well. A very great woman. I had forgotten she was your
niece. How does the old gang strike you?'

'Lasting well, sir. A bit older and maybe a bit wiser and settling down
into good citizens. They tell me that Sir Archibald Roylance is making
quite a name for himself in your Parliament, and that Lord Clanroyden
cuts a deal of ice with your Government. Dick Hannay, I judge, is
getting hayseed into his hair. How about yourself?'

'Fair,' Leithen said. 'I'm going out of business now. I've worked hard
enough to be entitled to climb out of the rut.'

'That's fine!' Blenkiron's face showed a quickened interest. 'I haven't
forgotten what you did for me when I was up against the Delacroix bunch.
There's no man on the globe I'd sooner have with me in a nasty place
than you. You've a mighty quick brain and a mighty sound judgment and
you're not afraid to take a chance.'

'You're very kind,' said Leithen, a little wearily. 'Well, that's all
done with now. I am going out of harness.'

'A man like you can't ever get out of harness. If you lay down one job
you take up another.'

Blenkiron's eyes, appraising now rather than meditative, scanned the
other's face. He leaned forward in his chair and sank his voice.

'I came round this morning to say something to you, Sir
Edward--something very special. Babs has a sister, Felicity--I guess you
don't know her, but she's something of a person on our side of the
water. Two years younger than Babs, and married to a man you've maybe
heard of, Francis Galliard, one of old Simon Ravelston's partners. Young
Galliard's got a great name in the city of New York, and Felicity and he
looked like being a happy pair. But just lately things haven't been
going too well with Felicity.'

In common politeness Leithen forced a show of attention, but Blenkiron
had noted his dull eyes.

'I won't trouble you with the story now,' he went on, 'for it's long and
a bit ravelled. But the gist of it is that Francis Gilliard has
disappeared over the horizon. Just leaked out of the landscape without a
word to Felicity or anybody else. No! There is no suggestion of
kidnapping or any dirty work--the trouble is in Francis's own mind. He
is a Canuck--a Frenchman from Quebec--and I expect his mind works
different from yours and mine. Now, he has got to be found and brought
back--first of all to Felicity, and second, to his business, and third,
to the United States. He's too valuable a man to lose, and in our
present state of precarious balance we just can't afford it.'

Blenkiron stopped as if he expected some kind of reply. Leithen said
nothing, but his thoughts had jumped suddenly to the upland meadow of
Clairefontaine of which he had been thinking that morning. Odd that that
remote memory should have been suddenly dug out of the lumber-room of
the past!

'We want help in the job,' Blenkiron continued, 'and it's not going to
be easy to find it. We want a man who can piece together the bits that
make up the jigsaw puzzle, though we haven't got much in the way of
evidence. We want a man who can read himself into Francis's mind and
understand the thoughts he might have been thinking. And, most of all,
we want a man who can put his conclusions into action. Finding Francis
may mean a good deal of bodily wear and tear and taking some risks.'

'I see.' Leithen spoke at last. 'You want a combination of detective,
psychologist, and sportsman.'

'Yep.' Blenkiron beamed. 'You've hit it. And there's just the one man I
know that fills the bill. I've had a talk with Lord Clanroyden and he
agrees. If you had been going on at the Bar, we would have offered you
the biggest fee that any brief ever carried, for there's money to burn
in this business--though I don't reckon the fee would have weighed much
with you. But you tell me you are shaking loose. Well, here's a job for
your leisure, and, if I judge you right, it's the sort of job you won't
turn down without a thought or two.'

Leithen raised his sick eyes to the eager face before him, a face whose
abounding vitality sharpened the sense of his own weakness.

'You've come a little late,' he said slowly. 'I'm going to tell you
something which Lord Clanroyden and the others don't know, and will
never know--which nobody knows except myself and my doctor--and I want
you to promise to keep it secret . . . I'm a dying man. I've only about
a year to live.'

He was not certain what he expected, but he was certain it would be
something which would wind up this business for good. He had longed to
have one confidant, only one, and Blenkiron was safe enough. The sound
of his voice speaking these grim words somehow chilled him, and he
awaited dismally the conventional sympathy. After that Blenkiron would
depart and he would see him no more.

But Blenkiron did not behave conventionally. He flushed deeply and
sprang to his feet, upsetting his chair.

'My God!' he cried. 'If I ain't the blighted, God-darned blundering
fool! I might have guessed by your looks you were a sick man, and now
I've hurt you in the raw with my cursed egotistical worries . . . I'm
off, Sir Edward. Forget you ever saw me. God forgive me, for I won't
soon forgive myself.'

'Don't go,' said Leithen. 'Sit down and talk to me. You may be the very
man I want.'

4


His hostess noticed his slow, appraising look around the table, which
took each of the guests in turn.

'You were here last in '34,' she said. 'Do you think we have changed?'

Leithen turned his eyes to the tall woman at his left hand. Mrs. Simon
Ravelston had a beautiful figure, ill-chosen clothes, and the
weather-beaten face of an English master of foxhounds. She was
magnificently in place on horseback, or sailing a boat, or running with
her beagles, but no indoor setting could fit her. Sprung from ancient
New England stock, she showed her breeding in a wonderful detachment
from the hubbub of life. At her own table she would drift into moods of
reverie and stare into vacancy, oblivious of the conversation, and then
when she woke up would turn such kind eyes upon her puzzled interlocutor
that all offences were forgiven. When her husband had been Ambassador at
the Court of Saint James's she had been widely popular, a magnet for the
most sophisticated young men; but of this she had been wholly
unconscious. She was deeply interested in life and very little
interested in herself.

Leithen answered: 'Yes. I think you all look a little more fine-drawn
and harder-trained. The men, that is. The women could never change.'

Mrs. Ravelston laughed. 'I hope that you're right. Before the depression
we were getting rather gross. The old Uncle Sam, that we took as our
national figure, was lean like a Red Indian, but in late years our
ordinary type had become round-faced, and puffy, and pallid like a
Latin John Bull. Now we are recovering Uncle Sam, though we have shaved
him and polished him up.' Her eyes ran round the table and stopped at a
youngish man with strong, rugged features and shaggy eyebrows who was
listening with a smile to the talk of a very pretty girl.

'George Lethaby, for example. Thank goodness he is a career diplomat and
can show himself about the world. I should like people to take him as a
typical American.' She lowered her voice, for she was speaking now of
her left-hand neighbour. 'Or Bronson, here. You know him, don't you?
Bronson Jane?'

Leithen glanced beyond his hostess to where a man just passing into
middle life was peering at an illegible menu card. This was the bright
particular star of the younger America, and he regarded him with more
than curiosity, for he counted upon him for help. On paper Bronson Jane
was almost too good to be true. He had been a noted sportsman and was
still a fine polo player; his name was a household word in Europe for
his work in international finance; he was the Admirable Crichton of his
day, and it was rumoured that in the same week he had been offered the
Secretaryship of State, the Presidency of an ancient University, and the
control of a great industrial corporation. He had chosen the third, but
seemed to have a foot in every other world. He had a plain, sagacious
face, a friendly mouth, and deep-set eyes, luminous and masterful.

Leithen glanced round the table again. The dining-room of the Ravelston
house was a homely place; it had no tapestries or panelling, and its
pictures were family portraits of small artistic merit. In each corner
there were marble busts of departed Ravelstons. It was like the rest of
the house, and, like their country homes in the Catskills and on the
Blue Ridge, a dwelling which bore the mark of successive generations who
had all been acutely conscious of the past. Leithen felt that he might
have been in a poor man's dwelling but for the magnificence of the table
flowers and silver and the soup plates which had once belonged to a King
of France. He let his gaze rest on each of the men.

'Yes,' he told his hostess, 'you are getting the kind of face I like.'

'But not the right colour, perhaps?' She laughed. 'Is that worry or too
much iced water, I wonder?' She broke off suddenly, remembering her
neighbour's grey visage.

'Tell me who the people are,' he said to cover her embarrassment. 'I
have met Mr. Jane and Mr. Lethaby and Mr. Ravelston.'

'I want you to know my Simon better,' she said. 'I know why you have
come here--Mr. Blenkiron told me. Nobody knows about it except in the
family. The story is that Mr. Galliard has gone to Peru to look into
some pitchblende propositions. Simon is terribly distressed and he feels
so helpless. You see we only came back to America from England four
months ago, and we have kind of lost touch.'

Simon Ravelston was a big man with a head like Jove, and a noble
silvered beard. He was president of one of the chief private banking
houses in the world, which under his great-grandfather had financed the
first railways beyond the Appalachians, under his grandfather had
salvaged the wreckage of the Civil War, and under his father had
steadied America's wild gallop to wealth. He had a dozen partners, most
of whom understood the technique of finance far better than himself, but
on all major questions he spoke the last word, for he had the great
general's gift of reducing complexities to a simple syllogism. In an
overworked world he seemed always to have ample leisure, for he insisted
on making time to think. When others of his calling were spending twelve
hectic hours daily in their offices, Simon would calmly go fishing. No
man ever saw him rattled or hustled, and this Olympian detachment gave
him a prestige in two continents against which he himself used to
protest vigorously.

'They think I'm wise only because I don't talk when I've nothing to
say,' he used to tell his friends. 'Any fool these days can get a
reputation if he keeps his mouth shut.'

He was happy because his mind was filled with happy interests; he had no
itching ambitions; he did his jobs as they came along with a sincere
delight in doing them well, and a no less sincere delight in seeing the
end of them. He was the extreme opposite of the man whose nerves demand
a constant busyness, because, like a bicyclist, he will fall down if he
stays still.

Leithen's gaze passed to a young man who had Simon's shape of head, but
was built on a smaller and more elegant scale. His hostess followed his
eyes.

'That's our boy, Eric, and that's his wife, Delia, across the table.
Pretty, isn't she? She has the Southern complexion, the real thing,
which isn't indigestion from too much hot bread at breakfast. What's he
doing? He's on the Johns Hopkins staff and is making a big name for
himself in lung surgery. Ever since a little boy he's been set on
doctoring and nothing would change him. He had a pretty good
training--Harvard--two years at Oxford--a year in Paris--a long spell in
a Montreal hospital. That's a new thing about our boys, Sir Edward.
They're not so set nowadays on big business. They want to do things and
make things, and they consider that there are better tools than dollars.
George Lethaby is an example. He's a poor man and always will be, for a
diplomat can't be a money-maker. But he's a happier man than Harold
Downes, though he doesn't look it.'

Mr. Lethaby's rugged face happened at the moment to be twisted into an
expression of pain out of sympathy with some tale of the woman to whom
he was talking, while his _vis--vis_, Mr. Downes, was laughing merrily
at a remark of his neighbour.

'Harold has a hard life,' said Mrs. Ravelston. 'He's head of the Fremont
Banking Corporation and a Saint Sebastian for everyone to shoot arrows
at. Any more to be catalogued? Why, yes, there are the two biggest
exhibits of all!'

She directed Leithen's eyes to two men separated by a handsome old woman
whose hair was dressed in the fashion of forty years ago.

'You see the man on the far side of Ella Purchase, the plump little man
with the eagle beak who looks like he's enjoying his food. What would
you set him down as?'

'Banker? Newspaper proprietor?'

'Wrong. That's Walter Derwent. You've heard of him? His father left him
all kinds of wealth, but Walter wasted no time in getting out of oil
into icebergs. He has flown and mushed and tramped over most of the
Arctic, and there are heaps of mountains and wild beasts named for him.
And you'd never think he'd moved farther than Long Island. Now place the
man on this side of Ella.'

Leithen saw a typical English hunting-man--lean, brown face with the
skin stretched tight over the cheekbones, pale, deep-set eyes, a small
clipped moustache, shoulders a little stooped from being much on
horseback.

'Virginian squire,' he hazarded. 'Warrenton at a guess.'

'Wrong,' she laughed. 'He wouldn't be happy at Warrenton, and I'm
certain he wouldn't be happy on a horse. His line is deep learning. He's
about our foremost pundit--professor at Yale--dug up cities in Asia
Minor--edited Greek books. Writes very nice little stories, too. That's
Clifford Savory.'

Leithen looked with interest at the pleasant, vital face. He knew all
about Clifford Savory. There were few men alive who were his equals in
classical scholarship, and he had published one or two novels, delicate
historical re-constructions, which were masterpieces in their way.

His gaze circled round the table, again noting the friendliness of the
men's eyes, the atmosphere of breeding and simplicity and stability. He
turned to his hostess--

'You've got together a wonderful party for me,' he said. 'I feel what I
always feel when I come here--that you are the friendliest people on
earth. But I believe, too, that you are harder to get to know than our
awkward, difficult, tongue-tied folk at home. To get to know really
well, I mean--inside your plate-armour of general benevolence.'

Mrs. Ravelston laughed. 'There may be something in that. It's a new idea
to me.'

'I think you are sure of yourselves, too. There is no one at this table
who hasn't steady nerves and a vast deal of common-sense. You call it
poise, don't you?'

'Maybe; but this is a picked party, remember.'

'Because of its poise?'

'No. Because every man here is a friend of Francis Galliard.'

'Friend? Do you mean acquaintance or intimate?'

The lady pursed her lips.

'I'm not sure. I think you are right, and that we are not an easy people
to be intimate with unless we have been brought up with the same
background. Francis, too, is scarcely cut out for intimacy. Did you ever
meet him?'

'No. I heard his name for the first time a few weeks ago. Which of you
knows him best? Mr. Ravelston?'

'Certainly not Simon, though he's his business partner. Francis has a
good many sides, and most people know only one of them. Bronson could
tell you most about his work. He likes my Eric, but hasn't seen much of
him in recent years. I know he used to go duck-shooting in Minnesota
with George Lethaby, and he's a trustee of Walter Derwent's Polar
Institute. I fancy Clifford Savory is nearer to him than most people.
And yet . . . I don't know. Maybe nobody has got to know the real
Francis. He has that frank, forthcoming manner which conceals a man, and
he's mighty busy too, too busy for intimacies. I used to see him once or
twice a week, but I couldn't tell you anything about him that everybody
doesn't know. It won't be easy, Sir Edward, to get a proper notion of
him from second-hand evidence. Felicity's your best chance. You haven't
met Felicity yet?'

'I'm leaving her to the last. What's she like? I know her sister well.'

'She's a whole lot different from Babs. I can tell you she's quite a
=person=.'

Leithen felt that if his hostess had belonged to a different social
grade she would have called her a 'lovely' woman. Her meaning was clear.
Mrs. Galliard was someone who mattered.

He was beginning to feel very weary, and, knowing that he must ration
his strength, he made his excuses and did not join the women after
dinner. But he spent a few minutes in the library, to which the men
retired for coffee and cigars. He had one word with Clifford Savory.

'I heard you five years ago at the Bar Association,' Savory said. 'You
spoke on John Marshall. I hope you're going to give me an evening on
this visit.'

Bronson Jane accompanied him to the door.

'You're taking it easy, I understand, Sir Edward, and going slow with
dinners. What about the Florian tomorrow at half-past five? In these hot
days that's a good time for a talk.'

5


The library of the Florian Club looked out on the East River, where the
bustle of traffic was now dying down and the turbid waters catching the
mellow light of the summer evening. It might have been a room in an old
English country house, with its Chippendale chairs and bookcases, and
the eighteenth-century mezzotints on the walls. The two men sat by the
open window, and the wafts of cool evening air gave Leithen for the
first time that day a little physical comfort.

'You want me to tell you about Francis Galliard?'

Bronson Jane's wholesome face showed no sign of fatigue, though he had
been having a gruelling day.

'I'll tell you all I can, but I warn you that it's not much. I suppose
I'm as close to him as most people, but I can't say I know him well. No
one does--except perhaps his wife. But I can give you the general
lay-out. First of all he is a French-Canadian. Do you know anything
about French Canada?'

'I once knew a little--a long time ago.'

'Well, they are a remarkable race there. They ought to have made a
rather bigger show in the world than they have. Here's a fine European
stock planted out in a new country and toughened by two centuries of
hardship and war. They keep their close family life and their religion
intact and don't give a cent for what we call progress. Yet all the time
they have a pretty serious fight with Nature, so there is nothing soft
in them. You would say that boys would come out of those farms of theirs
with a real kick in them, for they have always been a race of pioneers.
But so far Laurier is their only great man. You'd have thought that now
and then they would have produced somebody big in the business line,
like the Scots. You have young Highlanders, haven't you, coming out of
the same primitive world, who become business magnates? We have had some
of them in this country.'

'Yes. That is not uncommon in Scotland.'

'Well, Francis is the only specimen I've struck from French Canada. He
came out of a farm in the Laurentians, somewhere back of the
Glaubsteins' new pulp town at Chteau-Gaillard. I believe the Gaillards
go right back to the Crusades. They came to Canada with Champlain, and
were the seigneurs of Chteau-Gaillard, a tract of country as big as
Rhode Island. By and by they came down in the world until now they only
possess a little bit of a farm at the end of nowhere.'

'What took him out of the farm? The French don't part easily from the
land.'

'God knows. Ambition? Poverty? He never told me. I don't just know how
he was raised, for he never speaks of his early days. The village
school, I suppose, and then some kind of college, for his first notion
was to be a priest. He had a pretty good education of an old-fashioned
kind. Then something stirred in him and he set off South like the
fairly-tale Younger Son, with his pack on his back and his lunch in his
pocket. He must have been about nineteen then.'

Leithen's interest quickened. 'Go on,' he said, as Bronson paused. 'How
did he make good?'

'I'm darned if I know. There's a fine story there, but I can't get it
out of him. He joined a French paper in Boston, and went on to another
in Louisiana, and finished up in Chicago on a financial journal. I fancy
that several times he must have pretty nearly starved. Then somehow he
got into the bond business and discovered that he had a genius for one
kind of finance. He was with Connolly in Detroit for a time, and after
that with the Pontiac Trust here, and then Ravelstons started out to
discover new blood and got hold of him. At thirty-five he was a junior
partner, and since then he has never looked back. Today he's
forty-three, and there aren't five men in the United States whose repute
stands higher. Not bad for a farm boy, I'll say.'

'Does he keep in touch with his people?'

'Not he. That door is closed and bolted. He has never been back to
Canada. He's a naturalised American citizen. He won't speak French
unless he's forced to, and then it's nothing to boast of. He writes his
name "Galliard" not Gaillard. He has let himself become absorbed in our
atmosphere.'

'Really absorbed?'

'Well--that's just the point. He has adopted the externals of our life,
but I don't know how much he's changed inside. When he married Felicity
Dasent five years ago I thought we had got him for keeps. You don't know
Mrs. Galliard?'

Leithen shook his head. He had been asked this question now a dozen
times since he landed.

'No? Well, I won't waste time trying to describe her, for you'll soon
be able to judge for yourself; but I should call her a possessive
personality, and she certainly annexed Francis. Oh, yes, he was
desperately in love and only too willing to do what she told him. He's a
good-looking fellow, but he hadn't bothered much about his appearance,
so she groomed him up and made him the best-dressed man in New York.
They've got a fine apartment in Park Avenue and her dinners have become
social events. The Dasents are a horsey family and I doubt if Francis
had ever mounted a horse until his marriage, but presently she had him
out regularly with the Westbrook. He bought a country place in New
Jersey and is going to start in to breed 'chasers. Altogether she gives
him a pretty full life.'

'Children?'

'No, not yet. A pity, for a child would have anchored Francis. I expect
he has family in his blood like all his race.'

'He never appeared to be restless, did he?' Leithen asked.

'Not that I noticed. He seemed perfectly content. He used to work too
hard and wear himself out, and every now and then have to go off for a
rest. That's the Tom-fool habit we all have here. You see he hadn't any
special tastes outside his business to make him keen about leisure.
Felicity changed all that. She isn't anything of the social climber, or
ambitious for herself, but she's mighty ambitious for her man. She
brought him into all sorts of new circles, and he shines in them, too,
for he has excellent brains--every kind of brains. All the gifts which
made him a power in business she developed for other purposes. He was
always a marvel in a business deal, for he could read other men's minds,
and he would have made a swell diplomatist. Well, she turned that gift
to social uses, with the result that every type mixes well at their
parties. You'll hear as good talk at their table as you'll get anywhere
on the civilised globe. He can do everything that a Frenchman can do, or
an Englishman, or an American. She has made him ten times more useful to
Ravelstons than before, for she has made him a kind of national figure.
The administration has taken to consulting him, and he's one of the
people that foreigners coming over here have got to see. I fancy she has
politics at the back of her mind--last winter, I know, they were a good
deal in Washington.'

Bronson lit a fresh cigar.

'All set fair, you'd say, for the big success of our day. And then
suddenly one fine morning he slips out of the world like the man in
Browning's poem, and God knows what's become of him.'

'You know him reasonably well? Is he happy?'

Bronson laughed. 'That's a question I couldn't answer about my own
brother. I doubt if I could answer it about myself. He is gay--that is
the French blood, maybe. I doubt if he has ever had time to consider
whether he is happy or not, he lives such a bustling life. There can't
be much of the introvert in Francis.'

A man had entered the room and was engaged in turning over the magazines
on one of the tables.

'Here's Savory,' Bronson whispered. 'Let's have him join us. He's a
rather particular friend of Francis.' He raised his voice, 'Hullo,
Clifford! Come and have a drink. Sir Edward wants to see you.'

Clifford Savory, looking more like a country squire than ever in his
well-cut grey flannels, deposited his long figure in an armchair and
sipped the whisky-and-soda which the club servant brought him.

'We were talking about Galliard,' Bronson said. 'Sir Edward has heard a
lot about him and is keen to meet him. It's just too bad that he should
be out of town at present. It seems that Francis has got a reputation
across the water. What was it you wanted to ask, Sir Edward? How much of
his quality comes from his French blood?'

Savory joined his finger-tips and regarded them meditatively.

'That's hard to say. I don't know enough of the French in Canada, for
they're different from the French in Europe. But I grant you that
Galliard's power is exotic--not the ordinary gifts that God has given us
Americans. He can argue a case brilliantly with the most close-textured
reasoning; but there are others who can do that. His real strength lies
in his _flair_, which can't be put down in black and white. He has an
extra sense which makes him conscious of things which are still in the
atmosphere--a sort of instinct of what people are going to think quite a
bit ahead, not only in America, but in England and Europe. His mind is
equipped with no end of sensitive antennae. When he trusts that instinct
he is never wrong, but now and then, of course, he is overridden by
prosaic folk. If people had listened to him in '29 we should be better
off now.'

'That's probably due to his race,' said Leithen. 'Whenever you get a
borderland where Latin and Northman meet, you get this uncanny
sensitiveness.'

'Yes,' said Savory, 'and yet in other things his race doesn't show up at
all. Attachment to family and birthplace, for instance. Francis has
forgotten all about his antecedents. He cares as little about his origin
as Melchizedek. He is as rootless as the last arrived Polish immigrant.
He has pulled up his roots in Canada and I do not think he is getting
them down here--too restless for that.'

'Restless?' Leithen queried.

'Well, I mean mobile--always on the move. He is restless in another way,
too. I doubt if he is satisfied by what he does, or particularly happy.
A man can scarcely be if he lives in a perpetual flux.'




6


A figure was taking shape at the back of Leithen's mind, a figure
without material mould, but an outline of character. He was beginning to
realise something of the man he had come to seek. The following
afternoon, when he stood in the hall of the Galliards' apartment in Park
Avenue, he had the chance of filling in the physical details, for he was
looking at a portrait of the man.

It was one of the young Van Rouyn's most celebrated achievements,
painted two years earlier. It showed a man in riding-breeches and a buff
leather coat sitting on a low wall above a flower garden. His hair was a
little ruffled by the wind, and one hand was repelling the advances of
a terrier. Altogether an attractive detail of what should have been a
'conversation piece.' Leithen looked at the picture with the liveliest
interest. Galliard was very different from the conception he had formed
of him. He had thought of him as a Latin type, slim and dark, and it
appeared that he was more of a Norman, with well-developed shoulders
like a football player. It was a pleasant face, the brown eyes were
alight with life, and the mouth was both sensitive and firm. Perhaps the
jaw was a little too fine-drawn, and the air of bonhomie too elaborate
to be quite natural. Still, it was a face a man would instinctively
trust, the face of a good comrade, and there could be no question about
its supreme competence. In every line there was energy and quick
decision.

Leithen gazed at it for some time, trying to find what he had expected.

'Do you think it a good likeness?' he asked the woman at his side.

'It's Francis at his best and happiest,' she answered.

Felicity Galliard was a fair edition of her sister Barbara. She was not
quite so tall or quite so slim, and with all her grace she conveyed an
impression not only of physical health but of physical power. There was
a charming athleticism about her; she had none of Barbara's airy
fragility. Her eyes were like her sister's, a cool grey with sudden
lights in them which changed their colour. She was like a bird, always
poised to fly, no easy swoop or flutter, but, if need be, a long stern
flight against weather and wind.

She led Leithen into the drawing-room. Her house was very different from
the Ravelstons', where a variety of oddments represented the tastes of
many generations. It was a 'period' piece, the walls panelled in a
light, almost colourless wood, the scanty furniture carefully chosen, an
Aubusson carpet, and hangings and chintzes of grey and old rose and
silver. A Nattier over the fireplace made a centre for the exquisite
harmony. It was a room without tradition or even individuality, as if
its possessors had deliberately sought out something which should be
non-committal, an environment which should neither reflect nor influence
them.

'You never met Francis?' she asked as she made tea. 'We have been twice
to Europe since we married, but only once in England and then only for a
few days. They were business trips and he didn't have a moment to
himself.'

Her manner was beautifully composed, with no hint of tragedy, but in her
eyes Leithen read an anxiety so profound that it was beyond outward
manifestation. This woman was living day and night with fear. The sight
of her, and of the picture in the hall, moved him strangely. He felt
that between the Galliards and the friendly, eupeptic people he had been
meeting there was a difference, not of degree, but of kind. There was a
quality here, undependable, uncertain, dangerous perhaps, but rare and
unmistakable. There had been no domestic jar--of that he was convinced.
But something had happened to one of them to shatter a happy
partnership. If he could discover that something, he would have a clue
for his quest.

'I have never met your husband,' he said, 'but I've heard a great deal
about him, and I think I'm beginning to understand him. That picture in
the hall helps, and you help. I know your sister and your uncle, and now
that I'm an idle man I've promised to do what I can. If I'm to be of any
use, Mrs. Galliard, I'm afraid I must ask you some questions. I know
you'll answer them frankly. Tell me first what happened when he went
away.'

'It was the fourth day of May, a perfect spring day. I went down to
Westchester to see an old friend. I said good-bye to Francis after
breakfast, and he went to the office. I came back about five o'clock and
found a note from him on my writing-table. Here it is.'

She produced from an escritoire a half-sheet of paper. Leithen read:


    _Dearest, I am sick--very sick in mind. I am going away.
     When I am cured, I will come back to you. All my love._


'He packed a bag himself--the butler knew nothing about it. He took
money with him--at least there was a large sum drawn from his account.
No, he didn't wind up things at the office. He left some big questions
undecided, and his partners have had no end of trouble. He didn't say a
word to any of them, or to anybody else that I know of. He left no clue
as to where he was going. Oh, of course, we could have put on detectives
and found out something, but we dare not do that. Every newspaper in the
land would have started a hue and cry, and there would have been a storm
of gossip. As it is, nobody knows about him except his partners, and one
or two friends, and Uncle Blenkiron, and Babs and you. You see he may
come back any day quite well again, and I would never forgive myself if
I had been neurotic and let him down.'

Leithen thought that neurotic was the last word he would have chosen to
describe this resolute woman.

'What was he like just before he left? Was there any change in his
manner? Had he anything to worry him?'

'Nothing to worry him in business. Things were going rather specially
well. And, anyhow, Francis never let himself be worried by affairs. He
prided himself on taking things lightly--he was always what the old
folks used to call debonair. But--yes, there were little changes in him,
I think. All winter he had been almost too good and gentle and yielding.
He did everything I asked him without questioning, and that was not
always his way. . . Oh! and he did one funny thing. We used to go down
to Florida for a fortnight after Christmas--we had a regular foursome
for golf, and he liked to bask in the sun. This year he didn't seem to
care about it, and I didn't press him, for I'm rather bored with golf,
so we stayed at home. There was a good deal of snow at
Combermere--that's our New Jersey home--and Francis got himself
somewhere a pair of snowshoes and used to go for long walks alone. When
he came back he would sit by the hour in the library, not dozing, but
thinking. I thought it was a good way of resting and never disturbed
him.'

'You never asked what he was thinking about?'

'No. He thought a good deal, you see. He always made leisure to think.
My only worry was about his absurd modesty. He was sure of himself, but
not nearly so sure as I was, and recently when people praised him and I
repeated the praise he used to be almost cross. He wrote a memorandum
for the Treasury about some tax scheme, and Mr. Beverley said that it
was a work of genius. When I told him that, I remember he lay back in
his chair and said quite bitterly, "_Quel chien de gnie!_" He never
used a French phrase except when he was tired or upset. I remember the
look on his face--it was as if I had really pained him. But I could find
nothing to be seriously anxious about. He was perfectly fit and well.'

'Did he see much of anybody in particular in the last weeks?'

'I don't think so. We always went about together, you know. He liked to
talk to Mr. Jane and Mr. Savory, and they often dined with us. I think
young Eric Ravelston came once or twice to the house--Walter Derwent,
too, I think. But he saw far more of me than of anybody else.

'Oh, Sir Edward, you don't think that he's dead--that he went away to
die?'

'I don't. I haven't any fear of that. Any conclusion of mine would be
worthless at the present stage, but my impression is that Mr. Galliard's
trouble has nothing to do with his health. You and he have made a
wonderful life together. Are you certain that he quite fitted into it?'

She opened her eyes.

'He was a huge success in it.'

'I know. But did the success give him pleasure?'

'I'm sure it did. At least for most of the time.'

'Yes, but remember that it was a strange world to him. He hadn't been
brought up in it. He may have been homesick for something different.'

'But he loved me!' she cried.

'He loved you. And therefore he will come back to you. But it may be to
a different world.'




7


New scenes, new faces, the interests of a new problem had given Leithen
a few days of deceptive vitality. Then the reaction came, and for a long
summer's day he sat on the veranda of his hotel bedroom, in body a limp
wreck, but with a very active mind. He tried to piece together what he
had heard of Galliard, but could reach no conclusion. A highly strung,
sensitive being, with Heaven knew what strains in his ancestry, had been
absorbed into a new world in which he had been brilliantly successful.
And then something had snapped, or some atavistic impulse had emerged
from the deeps, something strong enough to break the tie of a happy
marriage. The thing was sheer mystery. He had abandoned his old world
and had never shown the slightest hankering after it. What had caused
this sudden satiety with success?

Bronson Jane and Savory thought that the trouble was physical, a
delicate machine overwrought and overloaded. The difficulty was that his
health had always been perfect, and there was no medical adviser who
could report on the condition of his nerves. His friends thought that he
was probably lying hidden in some quiet sunny place, nursing himself
back to vigour, with the secretiveness of a man to whom a physical
breakdown was so unfamiliar that it seemed a portent, almost a crime.

But Savory had been enlightening. Scholarly, critical, fastidious, he
had spoken of Galliard, the ordinary successful financier with no
special cultural background, with an accent almost of worship.

'This country of ours,' he told Leithen, 'is up against the biggest
problem in her history. It is not a single question like slavery, or
state rights, or the control of monopolies, or any of the
straight-forward things that have made a crisis before. It is a
conglomeration of problems, most of which we cannot define. We have no
geographical frontier left, but we've an eternal frontier in our minds.
Our old American society is really in dissolution. All of us have got to
find a new way of life. You're lucky in England, for you've been at the
job for a long time, and you make your revolutions so slowly and so
quietly that you don't notice them--or anybody else. Here we have to
make ours against time, while we keep shouting about them at the top of
our voices. Everybody and everything here has to have a new deal, and
the different deals have to be fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, or
there will be an infernal confusion. We're a great people, but we're
only by fits and starts a nation. You're fortunate in your British
Empire. You may have too few folk, and these few scattered over big
spaces, but they're all organically connected, like the separate apples
on a tree. Our huge population is more like a collection of pebbles in a
box. It's only the containing walls of the box that keep them together.'

So much for Savory's diagnosis.

'Francis is just the kind of fellow we need,' he went on. 'He sees
what's coming. He's the most intellectually honest creature God ever
made. He has a mind which not only cuts like a scalpel, but is rich and
resourceful--both critical and creative. He hasn't any prejudices to
speak of. He's a fascinating human being and rouses no antagonisms. It
looks as if he has dragged his anchor at present. But if we could get
him properly moored again he's going to be a power for good in this
country. We've got to get him back, Sir Edward--the old Francis.'

'The old Francis?' Leithen had queried.

'Well, with the old genius. But with an extra anchor down. I've never
been quite happy about the strength of his moorings.'




8


Walter Derwent at first had nothing to tell him. Francis Galliard had
not been interested in travel in far places. He was treasurer of his
Polar Institute, but that was out of personal friendship. Francis had
not much keenness in field sports either, though his wife had made him
take up fox-hunting. He never went fishing, and in recent years he had
not shot much, though he sometimes went after duck to Minnesota and the
Virginia shore. He was not much of a bird-shot, but he was deadly with
the rifle on the one occasion when Derwent had been with him after
deer...

Derwent screwed up his pleasant rosy face till, with his eagle beak, he
looked like a benevolent vulture. And then suddenly he let drop a piece
of information which made Leithen sit up.

'But he did ask me--I remember--if I could recommend him a really
first-class guide, a fellow that understood woodcraft and knew the
Northern woods. Maybe he was asking on behalf of someone else, for he
couldn't have much use himself for a guide.'

'When was that?' Leithen asked sharply.

'Some time after Christmas. Early February, I reckon. Yes, it was just
after our Adventurers' Club dinner.'

'Did you recommend one?'

'Yes. A fellow called Lew Frizel, a 'breed, but of a very special kind.
His mother was a Cree Indian and his father one of the old-time Hudson's
Bay factors. I've had Lew with me on half a dozen trips. I discovered
him on a trap-line in northern British Columbia.'

'Where is he now?'

'That's what I can't tell you. He seems to have gone over the horizon. I
wanted him for a trip up the Laird this fall, but I can get no answer
from any of his addresses. He has a brother, Jimmy, who is about as
good, but he's not available, for he has a job with the Canadian
Government in one of its parks--Waskesieu, up Prince Albert way.'

Leithen paid a visit to the Canadian Embassy, and after a talk with the
Minister, who was an old friend, the telegraph was set in motion. Johnny
Frizel, sure enough, had a job as a game warden at Waskesieu.

Another enquiry produced a slender clue. Leithen spent a morning at the
Ravelston office and had a long talk with Galliard's private secretary,
an intelligent young Yale man. From the office diary he investigated the
subjects which had engaged Galliard's attention during his last weeks
in New York. They were mostly the routine things on which the firm was
then engaged, varied by a few special matters on which he was doing
Government work. But one point caught Leithen's eye. Galliard had called
for the papers about the Glaubstein pulp mill at Chteau-Gaillard and
had even taken them home with him.

'Was there anything urgent about them?' he asked.

The secretary said no. The matter was dead as far as Ravelstons were
concerned. They had had a lot to do with financing the original
proposition, but long ago they had had their profit and were quit of it.




9


Leithen's last talk was with young Eric Ravelston. During the days in
New York he had felt at times his weakness acutely, but he had not been
conscious of any actual loss of strength. He wanted to be assured that
he had still a modest reservoir to draw upon. The specialist examined
him carefully and then looked at him with the same solemn eyes as had
Acton Croke.

'You know your condition, of course?' he asked.

'I do. A few weeks ago I was told that I had about a year to live. Do
you agree?'

'It's not possible to fix a time schedule. You may have a year--or a
little less--or a little more. If you went to a sanatorium and lived
very carefully you might have longer.'

'I don't propose to lead a careful life. I've only a certain time and a
certain amount of dwindling strength. I'm going to use them up on a hard
job.'

'Well, in that case you may fluff out very soon, or you may go on for a
year or more, for the mind has something to say in these questions.'

'There's no hope of recovery?'

'I'm afraid there's none--that is to say, in the light of our present
knowledge. But of course we're not infallible.'

'Not even if I turn myself into a complete invalid?'

'Not even then.'

'Good. That's all I wanted to know. Now I've one other question. I'm
going to look for Francis Galliard. You know him, but you never treated
him, did you?'

Eric Ravelston shook his head.

'He didn't want any treatment. He was as healthy as a hound.'

Something in the young man's tone struck Leithen.

'You mean in body. Had you any doubt about other things--his mind, for
instance?'

The other did not at first reply.

'I have no right to say this,' he spoke at last. 'And anyhow it isn't my
proper subject. But for some time I have been anxious about Francis.
Little things, you know. Only a doctor would notice them. I thought that
there was something pathological about his marvellous vitality. Once I
had Garford, the neurologist, staying with me and the Galliards came to
dinner. Garford could not keep his eyes off Francis. After they had gone
he told me that he would bet a thousand dollars that he crumpled up
within a year . . . So if there's a time limit for you, Sir Edward,
there may be a time limit also for Francis.'




10


Leithen disembarked on a hot morning from the Quebec steamer which
served the north shore of the St. Lawrence. Chteau-Gaillard was like
any other pulp town--a new pier with mighty derricks, the tall white
cylinders of the pulp mill, a big brick office, and a cluster of
clapboard shacks which badly needed painting. The place at the moment
had a stagnant air, for the old cutting limits had been exhausted and
the supply of pulpwood from a new area was still being organised. A
stream came in beyond the pier, and the background was of steep
scrub-clad hills cleft by a wedge-like valley, beyond which rose distant
blue lines of mountain.

For the first mile or two the road up the valley was a hard, metalled
highway. Leithen had not often felt feebler in body or more active in
mind. Thoreau had been a favourite author of his youth, and he had
picked up a copy in New York and had read it on the boat. Two passages
stuck in his memory. One was from _Walden_:

/#
     If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will
     see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimiter,
     and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow,
     and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or
     death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear
     the rattle in our throat and feel the cold in the extremities; if
     we are alive, let us go about our business.
#/

The other was only a sentence:

/#
     The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is
     required to be exchanged for it.
#/

How valuable was that thing for which he was bartering all that remained
to him of life? At first Blenkiron's story had been no more than a peg
on which to hang a private determination, an excuse, partly to himself
and partly to the world, for a defiant finish to his career. The task
fulfilled the conditions he wanted--activity for the mind and a final
activity for the body. Francis Galliard was a disembodied ghost, a mere
premise in an argument.

But now. Felicity had taken shape as a human being. There was an
extraordinary appeal in her mute gallantry, her silent, self-contained
fortitude. Barbara Clanroyden could not under any circumstances be
pathetic; her airy grace was immune from the attacks of fate; she might
bend, but she would never break. But her sister offered an exposed front
to fortune. She was too hungry for life, too avid of experience, too
venturesome, and, more, she had set herself the task of moulding her
husband to her ambitions. No woman, least of all his wife, would attempt
to mould Sandy Clanroyden . . . And the gods had given her tough
material--not a docile piece of American manhood, but something exotic
and unpredictable, something for which she had acquired a desperate
affection, but of which she had only a dim understanding.

As for Francis, that shadow, too, was taking form. Leithen now had a
picture of him in his mind, but it was not that of the portrait in the
hall of the Park Avenue apartment. Oddly enough it was of an older man,
with a rough yellow beard. His eyes were different, too, wilder, less
assured, less benevolent. He told himself that he had reconstructed the
physical appearance to match his conception of the character. For he had
arrived at a provisional assessment of the man . . . The chains of race
and tradition are ill to undo, and Galliard, in his brilliant advance to
success, had loosened, not broken them. Something had happened to
tighten them again. The pull of an older world had jerked him out of his
niche. But how? And whither?




11


The valley above the township was an ugly sight. The hillsides had been
lumbered out and only scrub was left, and the chutes where the logs had
been brought down were already tawny with young brushwood. In the bottom
was a dam, which had stretched well up the slopes, for the lower scrub
was bleached and muddied with water. But the sluices had been opened and
the dam had shrunk to a few hundred yards in width, leaving the near
hillsides a hideous waste of slime, the colour of a slagheap. The place
was like the environs of a town in the English Black Country.

Suddenly he was haunted by a recollection, a shadow at the back of his
mind. The outline of the hills was familiar. Looking back he realised
that he had seen before the bluff which cut the view of the St.
Lawrence into a wedge of blue water. He had forgotten the details of
that journey thirty years ago when he had tramped down from the
mountains, but it must have been in this neighbourhood. There was a
navvy on some job by the roadside, and he stopped the car and spoke to
him.

The man shook his head. 'I'm a newcomer here. There's a guy up there, a
Frenchie--maybe he'd tell you.'

Johnny Frizel went up the track in the bush to where a countryman was
cutting stakes. He came back and reported:

'He says that before the dam was made there was a fine little river down
there. The Clairefontaine was the name of it.'

Leithen's memory woke into vivid life. This valley had been his road
down-country long ago. He remembered its loveliness when
Chteau-Gaillard had been innocent of pulp mills and no more than a
hamlet of painted houses and a white church. There had been a strip of
green meadowland by the waterside grazed by old-fashioned French cattle,
and the stream had swept through it in deep pools and glittering
shallows, while above it pine and birch had climbed in virgin
magnificence to the crests. Now all the loveliness had been butchered to
enable some shoddy newspaper to debauch the public soul. He had only
seen the place once long ago at the close of a blue autumn day, but the
desecration beat on his mind like a blow. What had become of the little
Clairefontaine farm at the river head, and that delicate place on the
height of land which had of late been haunting him? . . . He felt a
curious nervousness and it brought on a fit of coughing.

At the end of the dam the road climbed the left side of the valley
through patches of spruce and a burnt-out area of blackened stumps. A
ridge separated it from the stream, and when it turned again to the
water's edge the character of the valley had changed. The Clairefontaine
rumbled in a deep gorge, and as the aged Ford wheezed its way up the
dusty roads, Chteau-Gaillard and its ugliness were shut off and Leithen
found himself in a sanctuary of the hills. He could not link up the
place with his memory of thirty years ago, when he had descended it on
foot in the gold and scarlet of autumn. Then it had been a pathway to
the outer world; now it was the entry into a secret and strange land.
There was no colour in the scene, except the hard blue of the sky. The
hot noon had closed down like a lid on an oppressive dull green waste
which offered no welcome.

His mind was full of Francis Galliard. Once this had been the seigniory
of his family, running back from the tidewater some scores of miles into
the wilderness. He felt the man here more vividly than ever before, but
he could not affiliate him with the landscape, except that he also was a
mystery . . .

Why had his wife and his friends in New York been so oddly supine in
looking for him? They had waited, and left it for a stranger to take on
the job. Fear of publicity, of course, in that over-public world. But
was that the only reason? Was there not also fear of Galliard? He was
not of their world, and they admired and loved him, but
uncomprehendingly. Even Felicity. What did they fear? That they might
wreck a subtle mechanism by a too heavy hand? They were all sensitive
people and highly intelligent, and they would have not walked so
delicately without a cause. Only now, when he was entering the cradle of
Galliard's race, did he realise how intricate was the task to which he
had set himself. And one to be performed against time. He remembered
young Ravelston's words. There was a time limit for Francis Galliard, as
there was one for Edward Leithen.

The valley mounted by steps, each one marked by the thunder of a
cataract in the gorge. Presently they rose above the woods, and came out
on a stretch of open upland, where the stream flowed among patches of
crops and meadows of hay. Now his memory was clearer, for he remembered
this place in exact detail. There was the farm of Clairefontaine, with
its shingled penthouse roof, its white-painted front, its tall
weather-beaten barn, its jumble of decrepit outhouses. There was the
little church of the parish, the usual white box, with a tin-coated
spire now shining like silver in the sun, and beside it a hump-backed
presbytery. And there was something beyond of which the memory was even
sharper. For the valley seemed to come to an end, the wooded ranges
closed in on it, but there was a crack through which the stream must
flow from some distant upland. Leithen knew what lay beyond that nick
which was like the back-sight of a rifle.

'We won't stop here,' he told Johnny, who handled the Ford like an
artist. 'Go on as far as the road will take us.'

It did not take them far. They bumped among stumps and roots over what
was now a mere cart track, but at the beginning of the cleft the track
died away into a woodland trail. They got out, and Leithen led the way
up the Clairefontaine. There was something tonic in the air which gave
him a temporary vigour, and he was surprised that he could climb the
steep path without too great discomfort. When they rested on a mossy
rock by the stream, he found that he ate his sandwiches with some
appetite. But after that it was heavy going, for there was the
inevitable waterfall to surmount, and, weary and panting, he came out
into the ultimate meadow of the Clairefontaine, which was fixed so
clearly in his recollection.

It was a cup in the hills, floored, not with wild hay, but with short
crisp pasture like an English down. From its sides descended the
rivulets which made the Clairefontaine, and in the heart of it was a
pool fringed with flags, so clear that through its six-foot depth the
little stir in the sand could be seen where the water bubbled up from
below. The place was so green and gracious that all sense of the wilds
was lost, and it seemed like a garden in a long-settled land, a garden
made centuries ago by the very good and the very wise.

But it was a watch-tower as well as a sanctuary. Looking south the hills
opened to show La Fleuve, the great river of Canada, like a pool of
colourless light. North were higher mountains which seemed to draw
together with a purpose, huddling to shepherd the streams towards a new
goal. They were sending the waters, not to the familiar St. Lawrence,
but to untrodden Arctic wastes. That was the magic of the place. It was
a frontier between the desert and the sown. To Leithen it was something
more. He felt again the spell which had captured him here in his distant
youth. It was the borderline between the prosaic world, where things
went by rule and rote and were all fitted to the human scale, and the
world as God first made it out of chaos, which had no care for humanity.

He stretched himself full length on the turf, his eyes feasted on the
mystery of the northern hills. Almost he had a sense of physical
well-being, for his breath was less troublesome. Then Johnny Frizel came
into the picture, placidly smoking an old black pipe. He fitted in well,
and Leithen began to reflect on his companion, who had docilely, at the
order of his superiors, flown over half Canada to join him.

Johnny was a small man, about five feet six, with broad shoulders and
sturdy bandy legs. He wore an old pair of khaki breeches and a
lumberman's laced boots, but the rest of his garb was conventional, for
he had put on his best clothes, not knowing what his duties might be. He
had a round bullet head covered with black hair cut very short, and his
ears stuck out like the handles of a pitcher. His Indian mother showed
in his even brown colouring, and his father in his mild, meditative blue
eyes. So far Leithen had scarcely realised him, except to admire his
speech, which was a wonderful blend of the dialect of the outlands, the
slang of America, and literary idioms, for Johnny was a great
reader--all spoken in the voice of a Scots shepherd, and with a broad
Scots accent. When the War broke out Johnny had been in the Labrador and
his brother Lew on the lower Mackenzie, and both, as soon as they got
the news, had made a bee-line for France and the front. They had been
notable snipers in the Canadian Corps, as the notches on the butts of
their service rifles witnessed.

'You have been lent to me, Johnny,' Leithen said. 'Seconded for special
service, as we used to say in the army. I had better tell you our job.'
Briefly he sketched the story of Francis Gaillard.

'This is the place where he was brought up,' he said. 'My notion is that
he's in Canada now. I think he is with your brother--at any rate, I know
that he was making enquiries about him in the early spring. You haven't
heard from your brother lately?'

'Not since Christmas. Lew never troubles to put me wise about his
doings. He may be anywhere on God's earth.'

'We want to find out, if we can, from old Gaillard at the farm and the
priest, if young Gaillard has been here. Or your brother. If my guess is
right, they won't be very willing to speak, but with luck they may give
themselves away. If the young Gaillard has been here, it gives us a bit
of a clue. They are a hospitable lot, so I propose that we quarter
ourselves on them for the night to have the chance of a talk. You can
put up at the farm, and I dare say I can get a shake-down at the
presbytery.'

Johnny nodded approval. His blue eyes dwelt searchingly on Leithen's
thin face, from which the flush of bodily exercise had gone, leaving a
grey pallor.

They retraced their steps when the sun had sunk behind the hills, and
the evening glow was beginning, soft as the bloom on a peach. The Ford
was turned, and rumbled down the valley until it was parked in the
presbytery yard. The priest, Father Paradis, came out to greet them, a
tall, lean old man much bent in the shoulders who, like all the Quebec
clergy, wore the cassock. He had been gardening and his lumberjack's
boots were coated with soil.

To Leithen's relief Father Paradis spoke the French of France, for,
though Canadian born, he had been trained in a seminary at Beauvais.

'But of a surety!' he cried. 'You shall sleep here, monsieur, and share
my supper. I have a guest room, though it is as small as the Prophet's
Chamber of the Scriptures.'

He would have Johnny stay also.

'No doubt Augustin can lodge Monsieur Frizel, but I fear he will have
rough quarters.'

Leithen's kit was left at the presbytery and he and Johnny walked to the
farm to pay their respects to the squire of Clairefontaine. He had
ascertained that this Augustin Gaillard, to whom the farm had descended,
was an uncle of Francis. The priest had given him a rapid sketch of the
family history. The mother had died in bearing Francis; the father a
year after Francis had left for the States. There had been an elder
brother, Paul, who two years ago had disappeared into the North, leaving
his uncle from Chteau-Gaillard in his place. There were also two
sisters who were Grey Nuns serving somewhere in the West--the priest did
not know where.

Augustin Gaillard was a man of perhaps sixty years, with a wisp of grey
beard and a moist, wandering eye. Everything about him bespoke the
drunkard. His loud-patterned shirt had a ragged collar and sleeves, his
waistcoat was discoloured with the dribbling of food, his trousers had
holes at the knees, and his bare feet were shod with _bottes-sauvages_.
There was nothing in his features to suggest the good breeding which
Leithen had noted in the picture of Francis. The house, which was more
spacious than the ordinary farm, was in a condition of extreme dirt and
disorder. Somewhere in the background Leithen had a glimpse of an
ancient crone who was doubtless the housekeeper.

But Augustin had the fine manners of his race. He placed his dwelling
and all that was in it at their disposal. He pressed Leithen to remove
himself from the presbytery.

'The good father,' he said, 'has but a poor table. He will give you
nothing to drink but cold water.'

Leaving Johnny deep in converse in the _habitant_ patois, Leithen went
back in the dusk to the presbytery. He was feeling acutely the frailty
of his body, as he was apt to do at nightfall. Had he chosen a different
course he would be going back to delicate invalid food, to a soft chair
and a cool bed; now he must make shift with coarse fare and the hard
pallet of the guest room. He wondered for a moment if he had not been
every kind of fool.

But no sick-nurse could have been more attentive than Father Paradis. He
had killed and cooked a chicken with his own hands. For supper there was
soup and the fowl, and coffee made by one who had learned the art in
France. The little room was lit up by a paraffin lamp, the smell of
which brought back to Leithen faraway days in a Scots shooting-box. The
old man saw his guest's weakness, and after the meal he put a pillow in
his chair and made him rest his legs on a stool.

'I see you are not in good health, monsieur,' he said. 'Do you travel to
restore yourself? The air of these hills is well reputed.'

'Partly. And partly in hope of finding a friend. I am an Englishman as
you see, and am a stranger in Canada, though I have visited it once
before. On that occasion I came to hunt, but my hunting days are over.'

Father Paradis screwed up his old eyes.

'At home you were perhaps a professor?'

'I have been a lawyer--and also a Member of our Parliament, but my
working days are past and I would make my soul.'

'You are wise. You are then in retreat? You are not, I think, of the
Faith?'

Leithen smiled. 'I have my faith to find, and perhaps I have little time
in which to find it.'

'There is little time for any of us,' said the old man. He looked at
Leithen with eyes long experienced in life, and shook his head sadly.

'I spoke of a friend,' said Leithen. 'Have you had many visitors this
summer?'

'Few come here nowadays. A pedlar or two, and a drover in the fall for
the farm cattle. There is no logging, for our woods are bare. People
used to come up from Chteau-Gaillard on holiday, but Chteau-Gaillard
is for the moment stagnant. Except for you and Monsieur Frizel it is
weeks since I have seen a stranger.'

'Had you no visitor from New York--perhaps in May? A man of the name of
Francis Gaillard?'

Leithen, from long practice in cross-examination, was accustomed to read
faces. He saw the priest's eyes suddenly go blank as if a shutter had
been drawn over them, and his mouth tighten.

'No man of that name has visited us,' he said.

'Perhaps he did not give that name. The man I mean is still young,' and
he described the figure as he had seen it in the New York portrait. 'He
is a kinsman, I think, of the folk at the farm.'

Father Paradis shook his head.

'No, there has been no Francis Gaillard here.'

But there was that in the old man's eyes which informed Leithen that he
was not telling all he knew, and also that no cross-examination would
elicit more. His face had the stony secrecy of the confessional.

'Well, I must look elsewhere,' Leithen said cheerfully. 'Tell me of the
people at the farm. I understand they are one of the oldest families in
Canada.'

Father Paradis's face lightened.

'Most ancient, but now alas! pitifully decayed. The father was a good
man, and a true son of the Church, but his farm failed, for he had
little worldly wisdom. As for Augustin, he is, as you see, a drunkard.
The son Paul was a gallant young man, but he was not happy on this soil.
He was a wanderer, as his race was in the old days.'

'Wasn't there a second son?'

'Yes, but he left us long ago. He forsook his home and his faith. Let us
not speak of him, for he is forgotten.'

'Tell me about Paul.'

'You must know, monsieur, that once the Gaillards were a stirring race.
They fought with Frontenac against the Iroquois, and very fiercely
against the English. Then, when peace came, they exercised their
hardihood in distant ventures. Many of the house travelled far into the
west and the north, and few of them returned. There was one, Aristide,
who searched for the lost British sailor Frankolin--how do you call
him?--and won fame. And only the other day there was Paul's uncle--also
an Aristide--who found a new road to the Arctic shores and discovered a
great river. Its name should be the Gaillard, but they tell me that the
maps have the Indian word, the Ghost.'

Leithen, who had a passion for studying maps, remembered the river which
flowed from north of the Thelon in the least-known corner of Canada.

'Is that where Paul went?' he asked.

'That is what we think. He was restless ever after his father died. He
would go off for months to guide parties of hunters--even down to the
Labrador, and in his dreams he had always his uncle Aristide. He was
assured he was still alive and that if he went to the Ghost River he
would find him. So one day he summons the other uncle, the worthless
one, and bids him take over the farm of Clairefontaine.'

'You have heard nothing of him since?'

'Not a word has come. Why should it? He has no care for Clairefontaine .
. . Now, monsieur, it is imperative that you go to bed, for you are very
weary. I will conduct you to the Prophet's Chamber.'

Leithen was in the habit of falling asleep at once--it was now his one
bodily comfort--but this night he lay long awake. He thought that he had
read himself into the soul of Francis Gaillard, a summary and
provisional reading, but enough to give him a starting point. He was
convinced beyond doubt that he had come to Clairefontaine in the spring.
He could not mistake the slight hesitation in the speech of Father
Paradis, the tremor of the eyelids, the twitch of the mouth before it
set--he had seen these things too often in the courts to be wrong. The
priest had not lied, but he had equivocated, and had he been pressed
would have taken refuge in obstinate silence. Francis had been here, and
had enjoined secrecy on the priest, and no doubt on old Augustin. He was
on a private errand and wanted to shut out the world.

He could picture the sequence of events. The man, out of tune with his
environment, had fallen into the clutches of the past. He had come to
Chteau-Gaillard and seen the ravaged valley--ravaged by himself and his
associates--and thereby a bitter penitence had been awakened. His
purpose now was to make his peace with the past--with his family, his
birthplace, and his religion. No doubt he had confessed himself to the
priest. Perhaps he had gone, as Leithen had gone, to the secret meadow
at the river head, and, looking to the north, had had boyish memories
and ambitions awakened. It was his business--so Leithen read his
thoughts--to make restitution, to appease his offended household gods.
He must shake off the bonds of an alien civilisation, and, like his
uncle and his brother and a hundred Gaillards of old, worship at the
altar of the northern wilds.

Leithen fell asleep with so clear a picture in his mind that he might
have been reading in black and white Francis's confession.


12

'We go back to Quebec,' he told Johnny next morning. 'But first I want
to go up the stream again.'

The mountain meadow haunted his imagination. There, the afternoon
before, he had had the first hour of bodily comfort he had known for
months. The place, too, inspired him. It seemed to stiffen his purpose
and to quicken his fancy.

Once again he lay on the warm turf beside the spring looking beyond the
near forested hills to the blue dimness of the far mountains. It was
that halcyon moment of the late Canadian summer when there are no flies,
and even the midday is cool and scented, and the first hints of bright
colour are stealing into the woods.

'I didn't get a great deal out of the old man,' said Johnny. 'He kept me
up till three in the morning listenin' to his stuff. He was soused when
he began, and well pickled before he left off, but he was never lit
up--the liquor isn't brewed that could light up that old carcase. I
guess he's got a grouse against the whole world. But I found out one
thing. Brother Lew has been here this year.'

Leithen sat up. 'How do you know?'

'Why, he asked me if I was any relation to another man of my name--a
fellow with half a thumb on his left hand and a scar above his right
eyebrow. That's Lew to the life, for he got a bit chawed up at Vimy.
When I asked him more about the chap, he felt he had said too much and
shut up like a clam. But that means that Lew has been here all right,
and that Augustin saw him, for to my certain knowledge Lew was never
before east of Quebec, and yon old perisher has never stirred out of
this valley. So I guess that Lew and your pal were here, for Lew
wouldn't have come on his own.'

Leithen reflected for a moment.

'Was Lew ever at the Ghost River?' he asked. 'I mean the river halfway
between Coronation Gulf and the top of Hudson's Bay.'

'Never heard of it. Nope. I'm pretty sure brother Lew was never within a
thousand miles of it. It ain't his bailiwick.'

'Well, I fancy he's there now . . . You and I are setting out for the
Ghost River.'


13

Leithen spent two weary days in Montreal, mostly at the telephone, a
business which in London he had always left to Cruddock or his clerk. He
knew that the Northland was one vast whispering-gallery, and that it was
easier to track a man there than in the settled countries, so he hoped
to get news by setting the machine of the R.C.M.P. to work. There was
telephoning and telegraphing far and wide, but no result. No such
travellers as Gaillard and Lew Frizel had as yet been reported north of
the railways. One thing he did ascertain. The two men had not flown to
the Ghost River. That was the evidence of the Air Force and the private
aeroplane companies. Leithen decided that this was what he had expected.
If Gaillard was on a mission of penitence, he would travel as his uncle
Aristide and his brother Paul had travelled--by canoe and trail. If he
had started early in May, he should just about have reached the Arctic
shores.

The next task was to get a machine for himself. He hired an aeroplane
from Air-Canada, a Baird-Sverisk of a recent pattern, and was lucky
enough to get one of the best of the Northern flyers, Job Teviot, for
his pilot, and one Murchison as his mechanic. The contract was for a
month, but with provision for an indefinite extension. All this meant
bringing in his bankers and cabling home, and the influence of
Ravelstons had to be sought to complete the business. The thermometer at
Montreal stood above 100, and there were times before he and Johnny
took off when he thought that his next move would be to a hospital.

He felt stronger when they reached Winnipeg, and next day, flying over
the network of the Manitoba lakes, he found that he drew breath more
easily. He had flown little before, and the elevation at first made him
feel very sleepy. This passed, and, since there was no demand for
activity, his mind turned in on itself. He felt like some disembodied
creature, for already he seemed to have shed all ordinary interests.
Aforetime on his travels and his holidays he had been acutely
interested in what he saw and heard, and part of his success at the Bar
had been due to the wide range of knowledge thus acquired. But now he
had no thoughts except for the job on hand. He had meant deliberately to
concentrate on it, in order to shut out fruitless meditations on his own
case; but he found that this concentration had come about automatically.
He simply was not concerned about other things. In New York he had
listened to well-informed talk about politics and business and books,
and it had awakened no response in his mind. Here in Canada he did not
care a jot about the present or future of a great British Dominion. The
Canadian papers he glanced at were full of the perilous situation in
Europe--any week there might be war. The news meant nothing to him,
though a little while ago it would have sent him home by the next boat.
The world had narrowed itself to Francis Gaillard and the frail human
creature that was following him.

By and by it was the latter that crowded in on his thoughts. Since he
had nothing to do except watch a slowly moving landscape and the cloud
shadows on lake and forest, he began to reflect on the atom, Edward
Leithen, now hurrying above the world. The memory of Felicity kept
returning--the sudden anguish in her eyes, her cry 'I love him? I love
him!'--and he realised how lonely his life had been. No woman had ever
felt like that about him; he had never felt like that about any woman.
Was it loss or gain? Gain, he told himself, for he implicated no one in
his calamity. But had he not led a starved life? A misfit like Gaillard
had succeeded in gaining something which he, with all his social
adaptability, had missed. He found himself in a mood almost of regret.
He had made a niche for himself in the world, but it had been a chilly
niche. With a start he awoke to the fact that he was very near the edge
of self-pity, a thing forbidden.

In a blue windless twilight they descended for the night at a new mining
centre on the Dog-Rib River. Johnny pitched a tent and cooked supper,
while the pilot and the mechanic found quarters with other pilots who
ran the daily air service to the South. There was a plague of black
flies and mosquitoes, but Leithen was too tired to be troubled by them,
and he had eight hours of heavy unrefreshing sleep.

When he stood outside the tent next morning, looking over a shining lake
and a turbulent river, he had a moment of sharp regret. How often he had
stood like this on a lake shore--in Scotland, in Norway, in Canada long
ago--and watched the world heave itself out of night into dawn! Like
this--but how unlike! Then he had been exhilarated with the prospect of
a day's sport, tingling from his cold plunge, ravenous as a hawk for
breakfast, the blood brisk in his veins and every muscle in trim. Now he
could face only a finger of bacon and a half-cup of tea, and he was
weary before the day had begun.

'There's plenty here knows Lew,' Johnny reported. 'They haven't come
this way. If they're at the Ghost River my guess is that they've gone by
the Planchette and The Old Man Falls.'

They crossed Great Slave Lake and all morning flew over those plains
miscalled the Barrens, which, seen from above, are a delicate lacework
of lakes and streams, criss-crossed by ridges of bald rock and banks of
gravel, and with now and then in a hollow a patch of forest. They made
camp early at the bend of a river, which Johnny called the Little Fish,
for Murchison had some work to do on the engine. While Leithen rested by
the fire, Job went fishing and brought back three brace of Arctic char.
He announced that there was another camp round the next bend--a white
man in a canoe with two Crees--a sight in that lonely place as
unexpected as the great auk. Somewhat refreshed by his supper, Leithen
in the long-lighted evening walked upstream to see his neighbour.

He found a middle-aged American cleaning a brace of ptarmigan which he
had shot, and doing it most expertly. He was a tall man, in breeches,
puttees, and a faded yellow shirt, and Leithen took him for an ordinary
trapper or prospector until he heard him speak.

'I saw you land,' the stranger said. 'I was coming round presently to
pass the time of day. Apart from my own outfit you're the first man I've
seen for a month.'

He prepared a bed of hot ashes, and with the help of rifle rods set the
birds to roast. Then he straightened himself, filled a pipe and had a
look at Leithen.

'I'm an American,' he said. 'New York.'

Leithen nodded. He had already detected the unmistakable metropolitan
pitch of the voice.

'You're English. Haven't I seen you before? I used to be a good deal in
London . . . Hold on a minute. I've got it. I've heard you speak in the
British Parliament. That would be in----' And he mentioned a year.

'Very likely,' said Leithen. 'I was in Parliament then. I was
Attorney-General.'

'You don't say. Well, we're birds of the same flock. I'm a corporation
lawyer. My name is Taverner. Yours--wait a minute--is Leven.'

'Leithen,' the other corrected.

'Odd we should meet here in about the wildest spot in North America.
It's easy enough to come by air, like you, but Matthew and Mark and I
have taken two blessed months canoeing and portaging from railhead, and
it will take us about the same time to get back.'

'Can corporation lawyers with you take four months' holiday?'

Mr. Taverner's serious face relaxed in a smile.

'Not usually. But I had to quit or smash. No, I wasn't sick. I was just
tired of the damned racket. I had to get away from the noise. The United
States is getting to be a mighty noisy country.'

The cry of a loon broke the stillness; otherwise there was no sound but
the gurgle of the river and the grunting of one of the Indians as he
cleaned a gun.

'You get silence here,' said Leithen.

'I don't mean physical noise so much. The bustle in New York don't worry
me more than a little. I mean noise in our minds. You can't get peace to
think nowadays.' He broke off. 'You here for the same cause?'

'Partly,' said Leithen. 'But principally to meet a friend.'

'I hope you'll hit him off. It's a biggish country for an assignation.
But you don't need an excuse for cutting loose and coming here. I
pretend to come to fish and hunt, but I only fish and shoot for the pot.
I'm no sort of sportsman. I'm just a poor devil that's been born in the
wrong country. There's quite a lot of folk like me. You'd be surprised
how many of us slip off here now and then to get a little quiet.

'I don't mean the hearty, husky sort of fellow who goes into the woods
in a fancy mackinaw and spends his time there drinking whisky and
playing poker. I mean quiet citizens like myself who've simply got to
breathe fresh air and get the din out of their ears. Canada is becoming
to some of us like a mediaeval monastery to which we can retreat when
things gets past bearing.'

Taverner, having been without white society for so long, seemed to enjoy
unburdening himself.

'I'm saying nothing against my country. I know it's the greatest on
earth. But, my God I hate the mood it has fallen into. It seems to me
there isn't one section of society that hasn't got some kind of
jitters--big business, little business, politicians, newspaper men, even
the college professors. We can't talk except too loud. We're bitten by
the exhibitionist bug. We're boosters and high-powered salesmen and
propagandists, and yet we don't know what we want to propagand, for we
haven't got any kind of common creed. All we ask is that a thing should
be colourful and confident and noisy. Our national industry is really
the movies. We're one big movie show. And just as in the movies we
worship languishing Wops and little blonde girls out of the gutter, so
we pick the same bogus deities in other walks of life. You remember
Emerson speaks about some nations as having guano in their destiny.
Well, I sometimes think that we have got celluloid in ours.'

There was that in Leithen's face which made Taverner pause and laugh.

'Forgive my rigmarole,' he said. 'It's a relief to get one's peeves off
the chest, and I reckon I'm safe with you. You see I come of New England
stock, and I don't fit in too well with these times.'

'Do you know a man called Galliard?' Leithen asked. 'Francis Galliard--a
partner in Ravelstons?'

'A little. He's a friend of Bronson Jane, and Bronson's my cousin. Funny
you should mention him, for if I had to choose a fellow that fitted in
perfectly to the modern machine I should pick Galliard. He enjoys all
that riles me. He's French, and that maybe explains it. I've too much of
the Puritan in my blood. You came through New York, I suppose. Did you
see Galliard? How is he? I've always had a liking for him.'

'No. He was out of town.'

Leithen got up to go. The long after-glow in the west was fading, and
the heavens were taking on the shadowy violet which is all the Northern
summer darkness.

'When do you plan to end your trip?' Taverner asked as he shook hands.

'I don't know. I've no plans. I've been ill, as you see, and it will
depend on my health.'

'This will set you up, never fear. I was a sick man three years ago and
I came back from Great Bear Lake champing like a prize-fighter. But take
my advice and don't put off your return too late. It don't do to be
trapped up here in winter. The North can be a darned cruel place.'


14

Late next afternoon they reached the Ghost River delta, striking in upon
it at an angle from the southwest. The clear skies had gone, and the
'ceiling' was not more than a thousand feet. Low hills rimmed the
eastern side, but they were cloaked in a light fog, and the delta seemed
to have no limits, but to be an immeasurable abscess of decay. Leithen
had never imagined such an abomination of desolation. It was utterly
silent, and the only colours were sickly greens and drabs. At first
sight he thought he was looking down on a bit of provincial Surrey,
broad tarmac roads lined with asphalt footpaths, and behind the trim
hedges smooth suburban lawns. It took a little time to realise that the
highways were channels of thick mud, and the lawns bottomless quagmires.
He was now well inside the Circle, and had expected from the Arctic
something cold, hard, and bleak, but also clean and tonic. Instead he
found a horrid lushness--an infinity of mire and coarse vegetation, and
a superfluity of obscene insect life. The place was one huge muskeg. It
was like the no-man's-land between the trenches in the War--a colossal
no-man's-land created in some campaign of demons, pitted and pocked with
shell-holes from some infernal artillery.

They skirted the delta and came down at its western horn on the edge of
the sea. Here there was no mist, and he could look far into the North
over still waters eerily lit by the thin pale evening sunlight. It was
like no ocean he had ever seen, for it seemed to be without form or
reason. The tide licked the shore without purpose. It was simply water
filling a void, a treacherous deathly waste, pale like a snake's belly,
a thing beyond humanity and beyond time. Delta and sea looked as if here
the Demiurge had let His creative vigour slacken and ebb into
nothingness. He had wearied of the world which He had made and left this
end of it to ancient Chaos.

Leithen scarcely tasted supper and fell asleep in a stupor of
depression. Already it seemed he was beginning to know death.

Next morning the scene had changed, and to his surprise he felt a
lightening of both mind and body. Sky and sea were colourless, mere
bowls of light. There seemed to be no tides, only a gentle ripple on the
grey sand. Very far out there were blue gleams which he took to be ice.
The sun was warm, but the body of the air was cold, and it had in it a
tonic quality which seemed to make his breathing easier. He remembered
hearing that there were no germs in the Arctic, that the place was one
great sanatorium, but that did not concern one whose trouble was organic
decay. Still he was grateful for a momentary comfort, and he found that
he wanted to stretch his legs. He walked to the highest point of land at
the end of a little promontory.

It was a place like a Hebridean cape. The peaty soil was matted with
berries, though a foot or two beneath was eternal ice. The breeding
season was over and the migration not begun, so there was no bird life
on the shore; the wild fowl were all in the swamps of the delta. The
dead level of land and sea made the arc of sky seem immense, the
'intense inane' of Shelley's poem. The slight recovery of bodily vigour
quickened his imagination. This was a world not built on the human
scale, a world made without thought of mankind, a world colourless and
formless, but also timeless; a kind of eternity. It would be a good
place to die in, he thought, for already the clinging ties of life were
loosened, and death would mean little since life had ceased.

To his surprise he saw a small schooner anchored at the edge of a
sandbank, a startling thing in that empty place. Johnny had joined him,
and they went down to inspect it. An Eskimo family was on board, merry,
upstanding people from far distant Gordon's Land. The skipper was one
Andersen, the son of a Danish whaling captain and an Eskimo mother, and
he spoke good English. He had been to Herschell Island to lay in stores,
and was now on his way home after a difficult passage through the ice of
the western Arctic. The schooner was as clean as a new pin, and the
instruments as well kept as on a man-o'-war. It had come in for fresh
water, and Job was able to get from it a few tins of gasoline, for it
was a long hop to the next fuelling stage. The visit to the Andersens
altered Leithen's mood. Here was a snug life being lived in what had
seemed a place of death. It switched his interest back to his task.

Presently he found what he had come to seek. On the way to the tent they
came on an Eskimo cemetery. Once there had been a settlement here which
years ago had been abandoned. There were half a dozen Eskimo graves,
with skulls and bones showing through chinks in the piles of stone, and
in one there was a complete skeleton stretched as if on a pyre. There
was something more. At a little distance in a sheltered hollow were two
crosses of driftwood. One was bent and weathered with the inscription,
done with a hot iron, almost obliterated, but it was possible to read
........TID . GAIL........D. There was a date too blurred to decipher.
The other cross was new and it had not suffered the storms of more than
a couple of winters. On it one could read clearly, PAUL LOUIS GAILLARD,
and a date eighteen months back.

To Leithen there was an intolerable pathos about the two crosses. They
told so much, and yet they told nothing. How had Aristide died? Had Paul
found him alive? How had Paul died? Who had put up the memorials? There
was a grim drama here at which he could not even guess. But the one
question that mattered to him was, had Francis seen these crosses?

Johnny, who had been peering at the later monument, answered that
question.

'Brother Lew has been here,' he said.

He pointed to a little Saint Andrew's cross freshly carved with a knife
just below Paul's name. Its ends were funnily splayed out.

'That's Lew's mark,' he said. 'You might say it's a family mark. Long
ago when Dad was working for the Bay there was a breed of Indians along
the Liard, some sort of Slaveys, that had got into their heads that
they were kind of Scots, and every Saint Andrew's Day they would bring
Dad a present of a big Saint Andrew's cross, very nicely carved, which
he stuck above the door like a horseshoe. So we all got into the way of
using that cross as our trade-mark, especially Lew, who's mighty
particular. I've seen him carve it on a slab to stick above a dog's
grave, and when he writes a letter he puts it in somewhere. So whenever
you see it you can reckon Lew's ahead of you.'

'They can't be long gone,' said Leithen.

'I've been figuring that out, and I guess they might have gone a week
ago--maybe ten days. Lew's pretty handy with a canoe. What puzzles me is
where they've gone, and how. There's no place hereaways to get supplies,
and it's a good month's journey to the nearest post. Maybe they shot
caribou and smoked 'em. I tell you what, if your pal's got money to
burn, what about him hirin' a plane to meet 'em here and pick 'em up? If
that's their game, it won't be easy to hit their trail. There's only one
thing I'm pretty sure of and that is they didn't go home. If we fossick
about we'll maybe find out more.'

Johnny's forecast was right, for that afternoon they heard a shot a mile
off, and, going out to enquire, found an Eskimo hunter. At the sight of
them the man fled, and Johnny had some trouble rounding him up. When
halted he stood like a sullen child, a true son of the Elder Ice, for he
had a tattooed face and a bone struck through his upper lip. Probably he
had never seen a white man before. He had been hunting caribou before
they migrated south from the shore, and had a pile of skins and
highsmelling meat to show for his labours. He stubbornly refused to
accompany them back to the tent, so Leithen left him with Johnny, who
could make some shape at the speech of the central Arctic.

When Johnny came back, Andersen and the schooner had sailed, and Ghost
River had returned to its ancient solitude.

'Lew's been here right enough,' he said. 'He and his boss and a couple
of Indians came in two canoes eleven days back--at least I reckoned
eleven days as well as I could from yon Eskimo's talk. Two days later a
plane arrived for them. The Eskimo has never seen a horse or an
automobile, but he knows all about aeroplanes. They handed over the
canoes and what was left of the stores to the Indians and shaped a
course pretty well due west. They've got the start of us by a week or
maybe more.'

That night after supper Johnny spoke for the first time at some length.

'I've been trying to figure this out,' he said, 'and here's what I make
of it. Mr. Galliard comes here and sees the graves of his brother and
uncle. So far, so good. From what you tell me that's not goin' to
content him. He wants to do somethin' of his own on the same line by way
of squarin' his conscience. What's he likely to do? Now, let's see just
where brother Lew comes in. I must put you wise about Lew.'

Johnny removed his pipe from his mouth.

'He's a wee bit mad,' he said solemnly. 'He's a great man--the 'cutest
hunter and trapper and guide between Alaska and Mexico, and the finest
shot on this continent. But he's also mad--batty--loony--anything you
like that's out of the usual. It's a special kind of madness, for in
most things you won't find a sounder guy. Him and me was buck privates
in the War until they made a sharpshooter of him, and you wouldn't hit a
better-behaved soldier than old Lew. I was a good deal in trouble, but
Lew never. He has just the one crazy spot in him, and it reminds me of
them Gaillards you talk about. It's a kind of craziness you're apt to
find in us Northerners. There's a bit of country he wants to explore,
and the thought of it comes between him and his sleep and his grub. Say,
did you ever hear of the Sick Heart River?'

Leithen shook his head.

'You would if you'd been raised in the North. It's a fancy place that
old-timers dream about. Where is it? Well, that's not easy to say.
You've heard maybe of the South Nahanni that comes in the north bank of
the Liard about a hundred miles west of Fort Simpson? Dad had a post up
the Liard and I was born there, and when I was a kid there was a great
talk about the South Nahanni. There's a mighty big waterfall on it, so
you can't make it a canoe trip. Some said the valley was full of gold,
and some said that it was as hot as hell owing to warm springs, and
everybody acknowledged that there was more game there to the square mile
than anywhere else in America. It had a wicked name, too, for at least a
dozen folk went in and never came out. Some said that was because of bad
Indians, but that was bunk, for there ain't no Indians in the valley.
Our Indians said it was the home of devils, which sounds more
reasonable.'

Johnny stopped to relight his pipe, and for a few minutes smoked
meditatively.

'Do you get to the Sick Heart by the South Nahanni?' Leithen asked.

'No, you don't. Lew's been all over the South Nahanni, and barring the
biggest grizzlies on earth and no end of sheep and goat and elk and
caribou, he found nothing. Except the Sick Heart. He saw it from the top
of a mountain, and it sort of laid a charm on him. He said that first of
all you had snow mountains bigger than any he had ever seen, and then
icefields like prairies, and then forests of tall trees, the same as you
get on the Coast. And then, in the valley bottom, grass meadows and an
elegant river. A Hare Indian that was with him gave him the name--the
Sick Heart, called after an old-time chief that got homesick for the
place and pined away. Lew had a try at getting into it and found it no
good--there was precipices thousands of feet that end. But he come away
with the Sick Heart firm in his mind, and he ain't goin' to forget it.'

'Which watershed is it on?' Leithen asked.

'That's what no man knows. Not on the South Nahanni's. And you can't get
into it from the Yukon side, by the Pelly or the Peel, or the Ross or
the Macmillan--Lew tried 'em all. So it looks as if it didn't flow that
way. The last time I heard him talk about it he was kind of thinking
that the best route was up from the Mackenzie, the way the Hare Indians
go for their mountain hunting. There's a river there called the Big
Hare. He thought that might be the road.'

'Do you think he's gone there now?'

'I don't think, but I suspicion. See here, mister--Lew's a strong
character and mighty set on what he wants. He's also a bit mad, and mad
folks have persuasive ways with them. He finds this Galliard man keen to
get into the wilds, and the natural thing is that he persuades him to go
to his particular wilds, which he hasn't had out of his mind for ten
years.'

'I think you're probably right,' said Leithen. 'We will make a cast by
way of the Sick Heart. What's the jumping-off ground?'

'Fort Bannerman on the Mackenzie,' said Johnny. 'Right, we'll start
tomorrow morning. We can send back the planes from there and collect an
outfit. We'll want canoes and a couple of Hares as guides.'

And then he fell silent and stared into the fire. Now and then he took a
covert glance at Leithen. At last he spoke a little shyly.

'You're a sick man, I reckon. I can't help noticin' it, though you don't
make a fuss about it. If Lew's on the Sick Heart and we follow him
there, it'll be a rough passage, and likely we'll have to go into camp
for the winter. I'm wonderin' can you stand it? There ain't no medical
comforts in the Mackenzie Mountains.'

Leithen smiled. 'It doesn't matter whether I stand it or not. You're
right. I'm a sick man. Indeed, I'm a dying man. The doctors in England
did not give me more than a year to live, and that was weeks ago. But I
want to find Galliard and send him home, and after that it doesn't
matter what happens to me.'

'Is Galliard your best pal?'

'I scarcely know him. But I have taken on the job to please a friend,
and I must make a success of it. I want to die on my feet, if you see
what I mean.'

Johnny nodded.

'I get you. I'm mighty sorry, but I get you . . . Once I had a retriever
bitch, the best hunting dog I ever knew, and her and me had some great
times on the hills. She could track a beast all day, and minded a
blizzard no more than a spring shower. Well, she got something mortally
wrong with her innards, and was dying all right. One morning I missed
her from her bed beside the stove, and an Indian told me he'd seen her
dragging herself up through the woods in the snow. I followed her trail
and found her dead just above the tree line, the place she'd been
happiest in when she was well. She wanted to die on her feet. I reckon
that's the best way for men and hounds.'


15

For three days Leithen was in abject misery. They had no receiver in
their plane and therefore no means of getting weather reports, and when
they took off the next morning the only change was an increased chill in
the air. By midday they had run into fog, and, since in that area Job
was uncertain of his compass, they went north again to the Arctic coast,
and followed it to the Coppermine. Here it began to blow from the north,
and in a series of rainstorms they passed the Dismal Lakes and came to
the shore of the Great Bear Lake. Job had intended to pass the night at
the Mines, but there was no going farther that evening in the mist and
drizzle.

Next day they struggled to the Mines with just enough gasoline. Leithen
looked so ill that the kindly manager would have put him to bed, but he
insisted on re-starting in the afternoon. They had a difficult take-off
from the yeasty lake--Job insisted on their getting into their
life-jackets, for he said that the betting was that in three minutes
they would be in the water. The lake was safely crossed, but Job failed
to hit off the outlet of the Great Bear River, and with the low
'ceiling' he feared to try a compass course to the Mackenzie because of
the Franklin Mountains. It was midnight before they struck the outlet
and they had another wretched bivouac in the rain.

After that things went better. The weather returned to bright sun, clear
skies, and a gentle wind from the northeast. Presently they were above
the Mackenzie, and far in the west they saw the jumble of dark ridges
which were the foothills of the Mackenzie Mountains. In the afternoon
the hills came closer to the river, and on the left bank appeared a
cluster of little white shacks with the red flag of the Hudson's Bay
Company flying from a post.

'Fort Bannerman,' said Johnny, as they circled down. 'That's the Big
Hare, and somewhere at the back of it is the Sick Heart. Mighty rough
country.'

The inhabitants of the fort were grouped at the mud bank where they went
ashore--the Hudson's Bay postmaster, two Oblate Brothers, a fur trader,
a trapper in for supplies, and several Indians. The trapper waved a
hand to Johnny--

'Hullo, boy!' he said, 'how goes it? Lew's been here. He lit out for the
mountains ten days ago.'




Part Two

THERE IS A RIVER, THE STREAMS WHEREOF SHALL MAKE GLAD THE CITY OF GOD.

                                                            PSALM XLVI


It took three days to get the proper equipment together, for Johnny was
leaving little to chance.

'If we find Lew and his pal we may have to keep 'em company for months.
It won't be easy to get to the Sick Heart, but it'll be a darn sight
harder to get out. We've got to face the chance of a winter in the
mountains. Lucky for us the Hares have a huntin' camp fifty miles
up-river. We can dump some of our stuff there and call it our base.'

The first question was that of transport. Water was the easiest until
the river became a mountain torrent. The common Indian craft was of
moose hides tanned like vellum and stretched on poplar ribs; but Johnny
managed to hire from a free-trader a solid-oak thirty-foot boat with an
outboard motor; and, as subsidiaries, a couple of canoes brought years
ago from the South, whose seams had been sewn up with strips of
tamarack root and caulked with resin. Two Indians were engaged, little
men compared with the big Plains folk, but stalwart for the small-boned
Hares. They had the slanting Mongol eyes of the Mackenzie River tribes,
and had picked up some English at the Catholic mission school. Something
at the back of Leithen's brain christened them Big Klaus and Little
Klaus, but Johnny, who spoke their tongue, had other names for them.

Then the Hudson's Bay store laid open its resources, and Johnny was no
niggardly outfitter. Leithen gave him a free hand, for they had brought
nothing with them. There were clothes to be bought for the
winter--parkas and fur-lined jerkins, and leather breeches and lined
boots; gloves and flapped caps; blankets and duffel bags. There were dog
packs, each meant to carry twenty-five pounds. There was a light
tent--only one, for the Hares would fend for themselves at the up-river
camp, and Lew and Galliard were no doubt already well provided. There
were a couple of shotguns and a couple of rifles and ammunition, and
there was a folding tin stove. Last came the provender: bacon and beans
and flour, salt and sugar, tea and coffee, and a fancy assortment of
tinned stuffs.

'Looks like we was goin' to start a store,' said Johnny, 'but we may
need every ounce of it and a deal more. If it's a winter-long job we'll
sure have to get busy with our guns. Don't look so scared, mister. We've
not got to back-pack that junk. The boat'll carry it easy to the Hares'
camp, and after that we'll cache the feck of it.'

Leithen's quarters during these days were in the spare room of the Bay
postmaster. Fort Bannerman was a small metropolis, for besides the Bay
store it had a Mounted Police post, a hospital run by the Grey Nuns, and
an Indian school in charge of the Oblate Brothers. With one of the
latter he made friends, finding that he had served in a French battalion
which had been on the right of the Guards at Loos. Father Duplessis was
from Picardy--Leithen had once been billeted in the shabby, flat-chested
chteau near Montreuil where the Father's family had dwelt since the
days of Henri Quatre. The Father had had a medical training and could at
need perform straight-forward operations, such as a bad appendix or the
amputation of a maimed limb. Leithen sat in his little room at the
hospital, which smelt of ether and carbolic, and they talked like two
old soldiers.

Once they walked together to where the Big Hare strained to the
Mackenzie through an archipelago of sandy islets.

'I have been here seven years,' Father Duplessis told him. 'Before that
I was three years in the eastern Arctic. That, if you like, was
isolation, for there was one ship a year, but here we are in a
thoroughfare. All through the winter the planes from the northern mines
call weekly, and in summer we have many planes as well as the Hudson's
Bay boats.'

Leithen looked round the wide circle of landscape--the huge drab
Mackenzie two miles broad, to the east and south interminable wastes of
scrub spruce, to the west a chain of tawny mountains, stained red in
parts with iron, and fantastically sculptured.

'Do you never feel crushed by this vastness?' he asked. 'This country is
out-size.'

'No,' was the answer, 'for I live in a little world. I am always busy
among little things. I skin a moose, or build a boat, or hammer a house
together, or treat a patient, or cobble my boots, or patch my coat--all
little things. And then I have the offices of the Church, in a blessedly
small space, for our chapel is a midget.'

'But outside all that,' said Leithen, 'you have an empty world and an
empty sky.'

'Not empty,' said Father Duplessis, smiling, 'for it is filled with God.
I cannot say, like Pascal, "le silence ternal de ces espaces infinis
m'effraie." There is no silence here, for when I straighten my back and
go out-of-doors the world is full of voices. When I was in my Picardy
country there were little fields like a parterre, and crowded roads.
There, indeed, I knew loneliness--but not here, where man is nothing and
God is all.'


2

They left Fort Bannerman on a clear, fresh morning when the sky was a
pale Arctic blue, so pale as to be almost colourless, and a small cold
wind, so tiny as to be little more than a shudder, blew from the north.
The boat chugged laboriously up the last feeble rapids of the Big Hare,
and then made good progress through long canal-like stretches in a waste
of loess and sand. Here the land was almost desert, for the scrub pines
had ceased to clothe the banks. These rose in shelves and mantelpieces
to the spurs of the mountains, and one chain of low cliffs made a kind
of bib round the edge of the range. There was no sound except the gurgle
of the water and an occasional sandpiper's whistle. A selvedge of dwarf
willow made the only green in the landscape, though in distant hollows
there were glimpses of poplar and birch. The river was split into a
dozen channels, and the Hares kept the boat adroitly in deep water, for
there was never a moment when it grounded. It was an ugly country, dull
as a lunar landscape, tilted and eroded ridges which were the approach
to the granite of the high mountains.

The three days at Fort Bannerman had done Leithen good, and though he
found his breathing troublesome and his limbs weak, the hours passed in
comparative comfort since there was no need for exertion. On the Arctic
shore and in the journey thence he had realised only that he was in a
bleak infinity of space, a natural place in which to await death. But
now he was conscious of the details of his environment. He watched the
drifting duck and puzzled over their breed, he noted the art with which
the Hares kept the boat in slack and deep water, and as the mountains
came nearer he felt a feeble admiration for one peak which had the shape
of Milan Cathedral. Especially he was aware of his companion. Hitherto
there had been little conversation, but now Johnny came into the
picture, sitting on the gunwale, one lean finger pressing down the
tobacco in his pipe, his far-sighted eyes searching the shelves for
game.

Johnny was very ready to talk. He had discovered that Leithen was Scots,
and was eager to emphasise the Scottish side of his own ancestry. On
the little finger of his left hand he wore a ring set with a small
bloodstone. He took it off and passed it to Leithen.

'Dad left me that,' he said. 'Lew has a bigger and better one. Dad was
mighty proud of the rings, and he told us to stick to them, for he said
they showed we come of good stock.'

Leithen examined it. The stone bore the three cinquefoils of Fraser.
Then he remembered that Frizel had been the name for Fraser in the
Border parish where he had spent his youth. He remembered Adam Fraser
the blacksmith, the clang of his smithy on summer mornings, the smell of
sizzling hoofs and hot iron on summer afternoons. The recollection gave
Johnny a new meaning for him; he was no longer a shadowy figure in this
fantastic world of weakness; he was linked to the vanished world of real
things, and thereby acquired a personality.

As they chugged upstream in the crisp afternoon, hourly drawing nearer
to the gate of the mountains, Leithen enjoyed something which was almost
ease, while Johnny in his slow, drawling voice dug into his memory. That
night, too, when they made camp at the bottom of a stone chute, and,
since the weather was mild, kept the driftwood fire alight more for show
than for warmth, Johnny expanded further. Since in his experience all
sickness was stomachic, he had included invalid foods among the stores,
and was surprised when Leithen told him that he need not fuss about his
diet. This made him take a more cheerful view of his companion's health,
and he did not trouble to see him early to bed. In his sleeping-bag on
a couch of Bay blankets Leithen listened to some chapters of Johnny's
autobiography.

He heard of his childhood on Great Slave Lake, and on the Liard, of his
father (his mother had died at his birth), of his brother
Lew--especially of Lew.

'We was brothers,' said Johnny, 'but also we was buddies, which ain't
always accordin' to rule.'

He spoke of his hunting, which had ranged from the Stikine to the
Churchill, from the Clearwater to the Liard, and of his trapping, which
had been done mostly about the upper waters of the Peace. Johnny as
talker had one weak point--he was determined that his auditor should
comprehend every detail, and he expanded in minutiae. He seemed resolved
that Leithen should grasp the difference in method between the taking of
mink and marten, the pen on the riverbank and the trap up in the hills.
He elaborated the technique of the spearing of muskrats, and he was
copious on the intricate subjects of fox . . . In every third sentence
there was a mention of Lew, his brother, until the picture that emerged
for Leithen from the talk was not that of wild animals but of a man.

It was a picture which kept dislimning, so that he could not see it
clearly; but it impressed him strangely. Lew came into every phase of
Johnny's recollections. He had said this or that; he had done this or
that; he seemed to be taken as the ultimate authority on everything in
heaven and earth. But Johnny's attitude was something more than the
admiration for an elder brother, or the respect of one expert for a
greater. There was uneasiness in it. He seemed to bring in Lew's name in
a kind of ritual, as if to convince himself that Lew was secure and
happy . . . What was it that he had said on the Arctic shore? He had
called Lew mad, meaning that he was possessed by a dream. Now Lew was
hot on the trail of that dream, and Johnny was anxious about him. Of
that there was no doubt.

Leithen laughed. He looked at Johnny's bat ears and bullet head. Here
was he, one who had seen men and cities and had had a hand in great
affairs, with his thoughts concentrated on an unknown brother of an
Indian half-breed! Galliard had almost gone out of the picture; to
Johnny he was only Lew's 'pal,' the latest of a score or two of
temporary employers. Even to Leithen himself the errant New Yorker, the
husband of Blenkiron's niece, the pillar of Ravelstons, seemed a minor
figure compared to the masterful guide who was on the quest for a
mysterious river. Had Lew inspired Galliard with his fancies? Or was the
inspiration perhaps Galliard's? What crazy obsession would he find if
and when he overtook the pair somewhere in that wild world behind which
the sun was setting?

That night they made camp at the very doorstep of the mountains, where
the river, after a string of box-canyons, emerged from the foothills. It
was an eerie place, for the Big Hare, after some miles of rapids,
drowsed in a dark lagoon beneath sheer walls of rock. Leithen's mind,
having been back all day in the normal world, now reacted to a mood of
black depression. What had seemed impressive a few hours before was now
merely grotesque and cruel. His errand was ridiculous--almost certainly
futile, and trivial even if it succeeded. What had he to do with the
aberrations of American financiers and the whims of half-breeds?
Somewhere in those bleak hills he would die--a poor ending for a not
undignified life! . . . But had his life been much of a thing after all?
He had won a certain amount of repute and made a certain amount of
money, but neither had meant much to him. He had had no wife, no child.
Had his many friends been more, after all, than companions? In the
retrospect his career seemed lonely, self-centred, and barren. And what
was this last venture? A piece of dull stoicism at the best--or, more
likely, a cheap bravado.


3

All next morning they smelt their way through the box-canyons, sometimes
with the engine shut off and the Hares poling madly. There were two
dangerous rapids, but navigation was made simpler by the fact that there
were no split channels and no shallows. They were going through the
limestone foothills, and the cliffs on either side were at least seven
hundred feet high, sheer as a wall where they did not overhang. Johnny
had a tale about the place. Once the Hares had been hunted by the
Crees--he thought it was the Crees, his own people, but it might have
been the Dog-Ribs. At that time the Big Hare River had come out of the
mountains underground. The Hare boats were no match for the fleet Cree
canoes, and the wretched tribe, fleeing upstream, looked for
annihilation when they reached the end of the waterway. But to their
amazement they found the mountains open before them and a passage
through the canyons to the upper valley where was now the Hares' hunting
camp. When they looked back there were no pursuing Crees, for the
mountain wall had closed behind them. But some days later, when the
disappointed enemy had gone back to their Athabaska swamps, the passage
opened again, and the Hares could return when they pleased to the
Mackenzie.

'Big magic,' said Johnny. 'I reckon them Hares got the story out of the
Bible, when the missionaries had worked a bit on them, for it's mighty
like the children of Israel and old Pharaoh.'

Suddenly the boat shot into a lake, the containing walls fell back, and
they were in a valley something less than a mile wide, with high
mountains, whose tops were already powdered with snow, ringing it and
blocking it to the north. The shores were green with scrub-willow, and
the lower slopes were dark with spruce and pine.

At the upper end of the lake, on a half-moon of sward between the woods
and the water, was the Hares' encampment. Big Klaus and Little Klaus set
up a howl as they came in sight of it, and they were answered by a
furious barking of dogs.

The place was different from Leithen's expectation. He remembered from
old days the birchbark lodges of eastern Canada; but in this country,
where the birches were small, he had looked for something like the tall
tepees of the Plains, with their smoke-holes and their covering of
skins. Instead he found little oblong cabins thatched with rush mats or
brushwood. They had a new look as if they had recently been got ready
for the winter, and a few caribou-skin tents showed what had been the
summer quarters. On the highest point of ground stood what looked like a
chapel, a building of logs surmounted at one end by a rough cross.
Penned near it was an assortment of half-starved dogs who filled the
heavens with their clamour.

The place stank foully, and when they landed, Leithen felt nausea
stealing over him. His legs had cramped with the journey and he had to
lean on Johnny's shoulder. They passed through a circle of silent
Indians, and were greeted by their chief, who wore a medal like a
soup-plate. Then a little old man hobbled up who introduced himself as
Father Wentzel, the Oblate who spent the summer here. He was about to
return to Fort Bannerman, he said, when his place would be taken for the
winter by Father Duplessis. He had a little presbytery behind the
chapel, where he invited Leithen to rest while Johnny did his business
with the Hares.

The priest opened the door which communicated with the chapel, lit two
tapers on the altar, and with pride displayed a riot of barbaric
colours. The walls were hung with cloths painted in bedlamite scarlets
and purples and oranges--not the rude figures of man and animals common
on the tepees, but a geometrical nightmare of interwoven cubes and
circles. The altar cloth had the same Byzantine exuberance.

'That is the work of our poor people,' said the priest, 'helped by
Brother Onsime, who had the artist's soul. To you, monsieur, it may
seem too gaudy, but to our Indians it is a foretaste of the New
Jerusalem.'

Leithen sat in the presbytery in a black depression. The smells of the
encampment--unclean human flesh, half-dressed skins of animals, gobbets
of putrefying food--were bad enough in that mild autumn noon. The stuffy
little presbytery was not much better. But the real trouble was that
suddenly everything seemed to have become little and common. The
mountains were shapeless, mere unfinished bits of earth; the forest of
pine and spruce had neither form nor colour; the river, choked with logs
and jetsam, had none of the beauty of running water. In coming into the
wilderness he had found not the majesty of nature, but the trivial, the
infinitely small--an illiterate half-breed, a rabble of degenerate
Indians, a priest with the mind of a child. The pettiness culminated in
the chapel, which was as garish as a Noah's Ark from a cheap toy shop .
. . He felt sick in mind and very sick in body.

Father Wentzel made him a cup of tea, which he could barely swallow. The
little priest's eyes rested on him with commiseration in them, but he
was too shy to ask questions. Presently Johnny arrived in a bustle. He
would leave certain things, if he were permitted, in the presbytery
cellar. He had arranged with the chief about dogs when they were wanted,
but that was not yet, for it would be a fortnight at least before snow
could be looked for, even in the high valleys, and, since they would
travel light, they did not need dogs as pack-animals. They would take
the boat, for a stage or two was still possible by it; after that they
would have the canoes, and he had kept the Hares as canoe-men--'for the
portagin' business would be too much for you, mister.'

He had news of Lew. The two men were not more than a week ahead, for a
sudden flood in the Big Hare had delayed them. They had canoes, but no
Indians, and had gone in the first instance to Lone Tree Lake. 'That's
our road,' said Johnny. 'Maybe they've made a base camp there. Anyhow,
we'll hit their trail.'

He had other news. It was the end of the seven years' cycle, and disease
had fallen on the snowshoe rabbit, upon which in the last resort all
wild animals depend. Therefore, the winter hunting and trapping of the
Hares would be poor, and there might be a shortage of food in their
camp. 'You tell Father Duplessis that when you get back to Fort
Bannerman,' he told the priest. Their own camp, if they were compelled
to make one, might run short. 'Lucky we brought what we did,' he told
Leithen. 'If we catch up with Lew we'll be all right, for he'd get
something to eat off an iceberg.'

They passed one night in the presbytery. While Johnny slept the deep,
short sleep of the woodsman, Leithen had a word with Father Wentzel.

'The two men who have gone before?' he asked. 'One is the brother of my
guide, and the other is a friend of my friends. How did they impress
you?'

The childlike face of the priest took on a sudden gravity.

'The gentleman, he was of the Faith. He heard Mass daily and made
confession. He was a strange man. He looked unhappy and hungry and he
spoke little. But the other, the guide, he was stranger. He had not our
religion, but I think he had a kind of madness. He was in a furious
haste, as if vengeance followed him, and he did not sleep much. When I
rose before dawn he was lying with staring eyes. For his companion, the
gentleman, he seemed to have no care--he was pursuing his own private
errand. A strong man, but a difficult. When they left me I did not feel
happy about the two messieurs.'


4

Out of the encumbered river by way of easy rapids the boat ran into
reaches which were like a Scottish salmon stream on a big scale, long
pools each with a riffle at its head. The valley altered its character,
becoming narrower and grassier, with the forest only in patches on
infrequent promontories. The weather, too, changed. The nights were
colder, and a chill crept into even the noontide sunshine. But it was
immensely invigorating, so that Johnny sang snatches of Scots songs
instead of sucking his pipe, and Leithen had moments of energy which he
knew to be deceptive. The air had a quality which he was unable to
describe, and the scents were not less baffling. They were tonic and yet
oddly sedative, for they moved the blood rather to quiescence than to
action. They were aromatic, but there was nothing lush or exotic in
them. They had on the senses the effect of a high violin note on the
ear, as of something at the extreme edge of mortal apprehension.

But the biggest change was in Leithen's outlook. The gloomy apathy of
the Oblate's presbytery disappeared, and its place was taken by a mood
which was almost peace. The mountains were no longer untidy rock-heaps,
but the world which he had loved long ago, that happy upper world of
birds and clouds and the last magic of sunset. He picked out ways of
ascent by their ridges and gullies, and found himself noting with
interest the riot of colour in the woods; the grey splashes of caribou
moss, the reds of partridgeberry, cranberry, blueberry and saskatoon;
the dull green interspaces where an old forest fire had brought forth
acres of young spruces; above all the miracle of the hardwood trees. The
scrub by the river, red-dog-willow, wolfberry willow, had every shade of
yellow, and poplar and birch carried on the pageant of gold and umber
far up the mountain-sides. Birds were getting infrequent; he saw duck
and geese high up in the heavens, but he could not identify them.
Sometimes he saw a deer, and on bare places on the hills he thought he
detected sheep. Black bears were plentiful, revelling among the berries
or wetting their new winter coats in the river's shallows, and he saw a
big grizzly lumbering across a stone chute.

Three long portages took them out of the Big Hare Valley to Lone Tree
Lake, which, in shape like a scimitar, lay tucked in a mat of forest
under the wall of what seemed to be a divide. They reached it in the
twilight, and, since the place was a poor camping-ground, they launched
the canoes and paddled halfway up till they found a dry spot, which some
ancient conflagration had cleared of timber. The lake was lit from end
to end with the fires of sunset, and later in the night the aurora
borealis cast its spears across the northern end. The mountains had
withdrawn, and only one far snow peak was visible, so that the feeling
of confinement, inevitable in high valleys, was gone, and Leithen had a
sense of infinite space around him. He seemed to breathe more freely,
and the chill of the night air refreshed him, for frost crisped the
lake's edges. He fell asleep as soon as he got under the blankets.

He awoke after midnight to see above him a wonderful sky of stars, still
shot with the vagrant shafts of the aurora. Suddenly he felt acutely his
weakness, but with no regret in his mind, and indeed almost with
comfort. He had been right in doing as he had done, coming out to meet
Death in a world where Death and Life were colleagues and not foes. He
felt that in this strange place he was passing, while still in time,
inside the bounds of eternity. He was learning to know himself, and with
that might come the knowledge of God. A sentence of Saint Augustine came
into his head as he turned over and went to sleep again: '_Deum et
animam scire cupio. Nihil ne plus? Nihil omnino._'


5

He woke to find himself sweating under his blankets. The weather had
changed to a stuffy mildness, for a warm chinook wind was blowing from
the southwest. Johnny was standing beside him with a grave face.

'Lew's been here,' he said. 'He's left his mark all right. Eat your
breakfast and I'll show you.'

At the base of the promontory there was a stand of well-grown spruce. A
dozen of the trees had been felled, stripped, cut into lengths, and
notched at each end. An oblong had been traced on a flat piece of
ground, and holes dug for end-posts. A hut had been prospected,
begun--and relinquished.

'Lew's been on this job,' said Johnny. 'You can't mistake his axe-work.'

He stood looking with unquiet eyes at the pile of cut logs.

'Him and his pal put in a day's work here. And then they quit. What
puzzles me is why Lew quit. It ain't like him.'

'Why shouldn't he change his mind?' Leithen asked. 'He must have decided
that this was not the best place for a base camp.'

Johnny shook his head.

'It ain't like him. He never starts on a job until he has thought all
round it and made sure that he's doin' right, and then hell-fire
wouldn't choke him off it. No, mister. There's something queer about
this, and I don't like it. Something's happened to Lew.'

The mild blue eyes were cloudy with anxiety.

'They've back-packed their stuff and gone on. They've cached their
canoe,' and he nodded to where a bulky object was lashed in the lower
branches of a tall poplar. 'We've got to do the same. We'll cache most
of our stuff, for when we catch up with Lew we can send back for it.
We'll take the Indians, for you ain't fit to carry a load. Their trail
won't be hard to follow. I've been over the first bit of it. Lew pushed
on ahead, and the other was about fifty yards back of him and limping.
Looks like they've quarrelled.'


6

The trail led away from the lake shore up a tributary stream towards
what looked like the main wall of the divide. The berry-clad, ferny
hillside made easy walking, and since the timber was small there were
few troublesome windfalls. Johnny carried his forty-four rifle, his axe,
and a bag containing his own personal effects and most of Leithen's; the
Hares, Big Klaus and Little Klaus, had the heavy stuff, tent, cooking
utensils, portable stove, stores; while Leithen had no more than a light
haversack, about the weight which he had often carried in the Alps. The
pattern of his day was now so familiar that he found it hard to fit into
it the astounding novelties in his life--his quest for a man whom he had
never seen in the least-known corner of North America--the fact that
presently somewhere in this wilderness he must die.

New also in his experience were the weather and his own weakness. The
sun was getting low and the days were shortening; each night frost
crisped the edges of the streams, and the first hour of the morning
march was through crackling pools and frozen herbage. But by noon the
sun was warm and it set daily over their left shoulders in a haze of
opal and pearl. The morning and evening chills were keenly felt, but
the tonic air seemed to soothe his coughing. It was the very
quintessence of air, quickening every sense so that he smelt more
keenly, heard more clearly, saw things in sharper outline. He had never
used spectacles, and he found that his eyes were fully the equal of
Johnny's when he knew what to look for.

He might have had an appetite, too, had it not been for his fatigue. He
was so tired when they made camp for the night that he could scarcely
eat, and Johnny had to turn his beans and bacon into a kind of soup
before he could swallow them. He would lie in a half-stupor drawing his
breath painfully for the better part of an hour, while Johnny and the
Hares built a fire. Johnny was merciful, and accommodated his pace to
his dragging feet, but the easiest gait was too much for him, and soon
he had to have hourly rests. The trail went in and out of the glens,
rising slowly to the higher benches, and, but for a few patches of swamp
and one laborious passage over a rockfall, it was a road a child could
have walked. But except for a very few minutes in the day it was for
Leithen one long purgatory.

He started out in the morning with wobbling legs. After a mile or so,
when his blood moved more briskly, he had a short spell of comfort. Then
his breath began to trouble him, and long before midday he was plodding
like a conscientious drunkard. He made it a point of honour to continue
until Johnny called a halt, and though Johnny did this often, he found
himself always near the limits of his strength, and would drop like a
log when the word was given. He returned unconsciously to an old habit
of his mountaineering days, when he had had a long dull course to
complete, counting his steps up to a thousand and walking to the rhythm
of 'Old Soldiers Never Die' . . . As he dragged his feet along he could
not keep back bitter memories. Once he had been as lightfoot on the
hills as a deer--many a Swiss guide and Highland stalker he had left
panting. Now on this top-of-the-world, in this diamond air, he was as
feeble as an anaemic woman in an airless city street.

At the head of a little pass Johnny halted, though the march had only
been going for twenty minutes. The Hares, when they came up, set down
their packs and broke into a dismal howling, which seemed to be meant
for a chant. There was a big jackpine with the lower branches lopped
off, and some fifty feet from the ground a long bundle was lashed to the
trunk, something wrapped in caribou skin tanned white.

Johnny removed his disreputable hat. 'That's a chief up there. Good old
scout he was--name of Billy Whitefish . . . Passed out last fall.'


7

One blue day succeeded another, and each was followed by a colder night.
The earth was yawning before it turned to its winter sleep. Leithen,
though the days tired him to desperation, yet found the nights
tolerable, and could let his thoughts stray from his bodily discomfort.
He listened to Johnny's talk.

Johnny talked much, for he had lost his shyness of Leithen, and this
kind of trip was child's play to him.

'This is a pretty good land,' he said, 'to them that knows their way
about. I guess a man could starve in the Barrens, but not in the woods.
Why, there's forty kinds of berries--and a whole lot of different sorts
of mushrooms--and rock-tripe--and bark you can boil to make porridge.
And there's all the animals that Noah had in the Ark. And there's
nothing to hurt a body provided the body's got sense, and don't tackle a
grizzly uphill.'

He had strong views on food. 'B'ar's right enough in the fall when he's
fat. A young'un's as good as mutton, but an old'un's plain shoe
leather.' He did not care for moose meat, preferring caribou or deer,
and he liked best partridge or ptarmigan in half-plumage.

'What's here? Grizzly, black b'ar, brown b'ar, moose, caribou, three
kinds of sheep--everything except goats. The Almighty left goats out
when he stocked them mountains.'

It was clearly his purpose to picture the land as an easy place even for
a sick man to travel in. 'Canadians,' he said (he used the word as the
equivalent of strangers, embracing everybody except the men of the
Northwest), 'think we've got hell's own climate up here. They're wrong.
We get milder winters than the Prairies. Besides, winter's a fine time
to travel if you know the ways of it. You'll be snugger in a hole in the
snow at forty below than in an apartment house in Winnipeg, and a darn
lot healthier.'

'But you've got to watch your step in the Northland,' he would add. He
would tell experiences of his own to show the cruelty of the wilds,
though he was always careful to explain that his misfortunes were due to
his own folly. He was a white-water man, though not of Lew's class, and
above all things he hated towing a boat with a long track-line. 'The
thing's just waitin' to murder you,' he said, 'trip you over a cliff, or
drown you, or get round your neck and saw your head off.'

He had been near starvation. 'I can go three days without food and not
feel it, and I've done it pretty often. I reckon Lew could go five. But
there's never been no reason for it except my own dam' folly. Once I
lost all my kit in a river, including my knife, and I had to make shift
with flint-flakes to kill and skin. I once lived for a week on berries
and one porcupine.'

He had had his accidents, too, as when a pine he was chopping down split
with the cold and sent a sliver through his shoulder. He had once walked
twenty miles to find a bottle of painkiller which he had cached, his
throat choking with laryngitis. But his worst adventure--he seemed shy
in telling it--was when he was caught without snowshoes in an early fall
blizzard, and crossed unknowingly a bottomless, half-frozen, sphagnum
swamp which heaved under his tread and made him vomit up his soul.

He would talk, too, about the secret lore of the woods. He could make
the crows speak to him, and the squirrels, but not the whisky-jacks,
because they were fools with only a cry and no speech. Lew could make
anything talk.

It was always Lew, the mentor, the magician. But he never spoke his
brother's name, or so it seemed to Leithen, without an accent of
disquiet. He followed unerringly Lew's blazing of the trail, and often
the blazes were so small that only a skilled woodsman could have noticed
them. He studied carefully every bivouac. Sometimes in marshy places he
found the moccasin tracks still fresh, and then his anxiety seemed to
increase.

'Lew's settin' a terrible pace,' he said, 'and the other's laggin'.
They're still messin' together at night, but the other must be gettin'
in pretty late, and he can't be havin' much sleep, for each mornin' they
starts together . . . I don't like it somehow. I wonder what brother
Lew's aimin' at?'


8

The trail wound intricately along the slopes of deep parallel glens, now
and then crossing from one to another by a low pass. Johnny had never
been over it before, and was puzzled. 'Them rivers run down to the
Yukon,' he told Leithen. 'But Lew swears the Sick Heart don't do that,
and we're over the divide from the Mackenzie. I reckon it can't have
nothin' to do with the Peel, so it must disappear into the earth. That's
my guess. Anyhow, this trail ain't goin' to get us nowhere except to the
Yukon.'

The celestial weather continued, wintry in the small hours of the night,
but in the sun as balmy as June. Leithen had fallen into a state which
was neither ease nor mal-ease, but something neutral, like his bodily
condition at the end of a hard term at the Bar, when he was scarcely ill
but assuredly not well. He could struggle through the day and have a
slender margin for the interests of the road.

There was one new thing--the wild animals were beginning to show
themselves, as if they were stretching their legs for the last time
before the snows came. One morning he saw the first moose--well up the
hillside in a patch of dwarf spruce, showing against the background like
elephants.

'Them beasts ain't happy here,' Johnny said. 'They want the hardwood
country, for they ain't like caribou that feed on moss--they likes the
juicy underbrush. I guess they'll come down before the snow to the
bottoms and stamp out a _ravage_ so as to get to the shoots. I'll tell
you a queer thing. The moose is pushin' farther north. I mind the day
when there wasn't one north of the Great Slave Lake, and now Lew has
seen 'em on the Arctic shore east of the Mackenzie. I wonder what's
bitin' 'em?'

The caribou had not yet appeared, being still on the tundras, but there
were birds--ptarmigan and willow grouse--and big Arctic hares just
getting into their winter coats. Also there were wolves, both the little
grey wolves and the great timber wolves. They did not howl, but
Johnny--and Leithen also--could hear them padding at night in the
forest. Sometimes dim shapes slipped across a glade among the trees. One
night, too, when Leithen could not sleep, he got up and watched the
northern heavens where the aurora flickered like a curtain of delicate
lace wrought in every tint of the rainbow. It lit up the foreground,
across which stalked a procession of black forms like some frieze on a
Greek urn.

He found Johnny at his side. 'That's the North,' he said solemnly. 'The
wolves and the aurory. God send us a kind winter.'


9

One day the trail took an odd turn, for it left the parallel ridges and
bore away to the east to higher ground. Johnny shook his head. 'This is
new country for me,' he said. 'Here's where Lew has taken the big
chance.'

Mountains prematurely snow-covered had been visible from the Hares'
settlement, and Leithen at Lone Tree Camp had seen one sharp white peak
in a gap very far off. Ever since then they had been moving among wooded
ridges at the most two thousand feet high. But now they suddenly came
out on a stony plateau, the trees fell away, and they looked on a new
world.

The sedimentary rocks had given place to some kind of igneous formation.
In front were cliffs and towers as fantastic as the Dolomites, black and
sinister against a background of great snowfields, sweeping upward to
ice artes and couloirs which reminded Leithen of Dauphin. In the
foreground the land dropped steeply into gorges which seemed to converge
in a deep central trough. But they were very unlike the mild glens
through which they had been ascending. These were rifts in the black
rock, their edges feathered with dwarf pines, and from their inky
darkness in the sunlight they must be deep. The rock towers were not
white and shining like the gracious pinnacles above Cortina, but as
black as if they had been hewn out of coal by a savage creator.

But it was not the foreground that held the eye, but the immense airy
sweep of the snowfields and ice pinnacles up to a central point, where a
tall peak soared into the blue. Leithen had seen many snow mountains in
his time, but this was something new to him--new to the world. The
icefield was gigantic, the descending glaciers were on the grand scale,
the central mountain must compete with the chief summits of the southern
Rockies. But unlike the Rockies the scene was composed as if by a great
artist--nothing untidy and shapeless, but everything harmonised into an
exquisite unity of line and colour.

His eyes dropped from the skyline to the foreground and the middle
distance. He shivered. Somewhere down in that labyrinth was Galliard.
Somewhere down there he would leave his own bones.

Johnny was staring at the scene without speaking a word, without even an
exclamation. At last he drew a long breath.

'God!' he said. 'Them's the biggest mountains in the Northland and only
you and me and Lew and his pal has seen 'em, and some Indians that don't
count. But it's goin' to be a blasted country to travel. See that black
gash? I reckon that's where the Sick Heart River flows, and it'll be
hell's own job to get down to it.'

'D'you think Lew and Galliard are there?' Leithen asked.

'Sure. I got their trail a piece back on the sand of that little pond we
passed. We'll pick it up soon on them shale slides.'

'Is the road possible?'

'Lew thinks it is. I told you he'd seen the Sick Heart once, but he
couldn't get down the precipices. It couldn't have been this place or he
wouldn't have gone on, for he don't try impossibilities. He sure knows
there's a way down.'

Leithen, sitting on the mountain gravel, had a sudden sharp pang of
hopelessness, almost of fear. He realised that this spectacle of a new
mountain-land would once have sent him wild with excitement, the
excitement both of the geographer and the mountaineer. But now he could
only look at it with despair. It might have been a Pisgah-sight of a
promised land; but now it was only a cruel reminder of his frailty. He
had still to find Galliard, but Galliard had gone into this perilous
labyrinth. Could he follow? Could he reach him? . . . But did it matter
after all? The finding of Galliard was a task he had set himself,
thinking less of success than of the task. It was to tide away the time
manfully before his end so that he could die standing. A comforting
phrase of Walt Whitman's came back to him, 'the delicious near-by
assurance of death.'

Sometimes lately he had been surprised at himself. He had not thought
that he possessed this one-ideaed stoicism which enabled him to climb
the bleak staircase of his duty with scarcely a look behind . . . But
perhaps this was the way in which most men faced death. Had his health
lasted he would be doing the same thing a dozen or a score of years
ahead. Soon his friends would be doing it--Hannay and Lamancha and
Clanroyden--if they were fated to end in their beds. It was the lot of
everyone sooner or later to reach the blank bag's-end of life into
which they must creep to die.


10

They soon picked up the tracks of their forerunners in the long spouts
of gravel, and as they slowly zigzagged downhill to the tree line the
weather changed. The cold blue sky beyond the mountains dulled to a
colder grey and all light went out of the landscape. It was like the
coming of the Polar Night of which he had read, the inexorable
drawing-down of a curtain upon the glory of the world. The snow began to
fall in big flakes, not driven by any wind, but like the gentle emptying
of a giant celestial bin. Soon there was nothing but white round them,
except the tops of the little gnarled firs.

Luckily they had reached the tree line before the snow began, for
otherwise they might have lost the trail. As it was, Johnny soon picked
it up from the blazes on the diminutive trunks. It led them down a slope
so steep that it was marvellous that any roots could cling to it. They
had to ford many ice-cold streams, and before they reached flat ground
in the evening, Leithen was tottering on the very outside edge of his
strength. He scarcely heard Johnny's mutter, 'Looks like Lew has lost
his pal. Here's where he camped and there's just the one set of tracks.'
He was repeating to himself Whitman's words like a prayer.

Johnny saw his weariness and mercifully said no more, contenting himself
with making camp and cooking supper. Leithen fell asleep as soon as he
had finished his meal, and did not wake until he heard the crackling of
the breakfast fire. The air was mild and most of the snow had gone, for
the wind had shifted to the southwest. Every limb ached after the long
march of yesterday, but his chest was easier and there seemed more pith
in his bones.

Johnny wore an anxious face. 'We've made up on 'em,' he said. 'I reckon
Lew's not two days ahead.'

Leithen asked how he knew this, but Johnny said he knew, but could not
explain--it would take too long and a stranger to the wilds would not
understand.

'He's gone on alone,' he repeated. 'This was his camping-ground three
nights back, and the other wasn't here. They parted company sometime
that day, for we had the trail of both of 'em on the shale slides. What
in God's name has happened? Lew has shook off his pal, and that pal is
somewhere around here, and, being new to the job, he'll die. Maybe he's
dead already.'

'Has Lew gone on?'

'Lew's gone on. I've been over a bit of his trail. He's not wastin'
time.'

'But the other--my friend--won't he have followed Lew's blazes?'

'He wouldn't notice 'em, bein' raw. Lew's blazed a trail for his use on
the way back, not for any pal to follow.'

So this was journey's end for him--to have traced Galliard to the
uttermost parts of the earth only to find him dead. Remembrance of his
errand and his original purpose awoke exasperation, and exasperation
stirred the dying embers of his vitality.

'Our job is to find Mr. Galliard,' he said. 'We stay here until we get
him dead or alive.'

Johnny nodded. 'I guess that's right, but I'm mighty anxious about
brother Lew. Looks like he's gone haywire.'

The snow was the trouble, Johnny said. It was disappearing fast under
sun and wind, and its melting would obliterate all tracks on soft
ground, almost as completely as if it still covered them. He thought
that the Hares were better trackers than himself and they might find
what he missed. He proposed that Leithen should lie up in camp while he
and the Indians went back on yesterday's trail in the hope of finding
the place where the two men had parted.

Johnny packed some food, and in half an hour he and the Hares were
climbing the steep side of the glen. Leithen carried his blankets out to
a patch which the sun had already dried, and basked in the thin winter
sunshine. Oddly enough, Johnny's news had not made him restless, though
it threatened disaster to his journey. He had wanted that journey to
succeed, but the mere finding of Galliard would not spell success, or
the loss of him failure. Success lay in his own spirit. A slight
increase of bodily comfort had given him also a certain spiritual ease.
This sun was good, though soon for him it would not rise again.

The search party did not return until the brief twilight. Johnny, as he
entered the tent, shook his head dolefully.

'No good, mister. We've found where the other feller quit the
trail--them Hares are demons at that game. Just where I expected--up on
the barrens where there ain't no trees to blaze and brother Lew had got
out of sight. But after that we couldn't pick up no trail. He might have
gone left or he might have gone right, but anyhow he must have gone down
into the woods. So we started to beat out the woods, each of us takin' a
line, but we've struck nothin'. Tomorrow we'll have another try. I
reckon he can't have gone far, for he's dead lame. He must be lyin' up
somewhere and starvin'.'

Johnny counted on his fingers.

'Say, look! He's been three days quit of Lew--he's dead lame, and I
reckon he wasn't carryin' more'n his own weight--if he didn't catch up
with Lew at night he didn't have no food--maybe he wasn't able to make
fire--maybe he didn't carry more'n one blanket--if he's alive he's
mighty cold and mighty hungry.'

He was silent until he went to bed, a certain proof of anxiety.

'This sure is one hell of a business,' he said as he turned in. 'Lew
kind of mad and streakin' off into space, and his pal aimin' to be a
corpse. It's enough to put a man off his feed.'


11

Johnny and the Hares were off at dawn next morning. The weather was
mild, almost stuffy, and there had been little frost in the night.
Leithen sat outside the tent, but there was no sun to warm him, only a
grey misty sky which bent low on the hills. He was feeling his weakness
again, and with it came a deep depression of spirit. The wilds were
brutal, inhuman, the abode of horrid cruelty. They had driven one man
mad and would be the death of another. Not much comfort for Felicity
Galliard in his report--'Discovered where your man had gone. Followed
him and found him dead.' That report would be carried by Johnny down
into the civilised places, and cabled to New York, signed with the name
of Leithen. But he would not see Felicity's grief, for long before then
he would be out of the world.

In the afternoon the weather changed. The heavens darkened and suddenly
burst into a lacework of lightning. It was almost like the aurora, only
it covered the whole expanse of sky. From far away there was a kind of
muttering, but there were no loud thunder peals. After an hour it ceased
and a little cold wind came out of the west. This was followed by a
torrential rain, the heaviest Leithen had ever seen, which fell, not in
sheets, but with the solid three-dimensions of a cataract. In five
minutes the hillside was running with water and the floor of the tent
was a bog. In half an hour the brook below was a raging torrent. The
downpour ceased and was followed by a burst of sunshine from a pale
lemon sky, and a sudden sharpening of the air. Johnny had spoken of
this; he had said that the winter would not properly be on them until
they had the father and mother of a thunderstorm and the last rains.

Leithen pulled on his gum boots and went out for a breath of air. The
hill was melting under him, and only by walking in the thicker patches
of fern and berries could he find decent foothold. Somehow his
depression had lifted with the passing of the storm, and in the sharp
air his breath came easier. It was arduous work walking in that tangle.
'I had better not go far,' he told himself, 'or I'll never get home. Not
much chance for Johnny and the Indians after such a downpour.'

He turned to look back . . . There seemed to be a lumbering body at the
door of the tent trying to crawl inside. A bear, no doubt. If the brute
got at the food there would be trouble. Leithen started to slither along
the hillside, falling often, and feeling his breath run short.

The thing was inside. He had closed the door-flap before leaving, and
now he tore it back to let in the light. The beast was there, crouching
on its knees on the muddy floor. It was a sick beast, for it seemed to
nuzzle the ground and emit feeble groans and gasps of pain. A bear! Its
hinder parts were one clot of mud, but something like a ragged blanket
seemed to be round its middle. The head! The head looked like black fur,
and then he saw that this was a cap and that beneath it was shaggy human
hair.

The thing moaned, and then from it came a sound which, though made by
dry lips, was articulate speech.

'Frizelle!' it said. 'O Frizelle! . . . _pour l'amour de Dieu!_'


12

It took all Leithen's strength to move Galliard from the floor to his
bed. He folded a blanket and put it under his head. Then he undid the
muffler at his throat and unbuttoned the shirt. The man's lips were blue
and sore, and his cheeks were shrunk with hunger and fatigue. He seemed
to be in pain, for as he lay on his back he moaned and screwed up his
eyes. His wits were dulled in a stupor, and, apart from his first
muttered words, he seemed to be unconscious of his environment.

Leithen mixed a little brandy and tinned milk and forced it between his
lips. It was swallowed and immediately vomited. So he lit the stove and
put on the kettle to boil, fetching water from the near-by spring. The
moaning continued as if the man were in pain, and he remembered that
Johnny had guessed at a wounded foot. The sight of another mortal
suffering seemed to give Leithen a certain access of strength. He found
himself able to undo Galliard's boots, and it was no light task, for
they were crusted thick with mud. The left one had been sliced open like
a gouty man's shoe, to give ease to a wound in his shin, a raw, ragged
gash which looked like an axe cut. Before the boot could be removed, the
moaning had several times changed to a gasp of pain. Leithen made an
attempt to wash the wound, and bound it up with a handkerchief, which
was all he had in the way of a bandage. That seemed to give Galliard
relief, and the moaning ceased.

The kettle was boiling and he made tea. Galliard tried to take the
pannikin, but his hands were shaking so that Leithen had to feed him
like a child. He swallowed all that he did not spill and seemed to want
more. So Leithen tried him again with brandy and milk, the milk this
time thinned and heated. Now two brown eyes were staring at him, eyes in
which consciousness was slowly dawning. The milk was drunk and Galliard
lay for a little, blinking at the tent. Then his eyes closed and he
slept.

Leithen laid himself down on Johnny's mattress and looked at the
shapeless heap which had been the object of his quest. There was the
tawny beard which he had come to expect, but for the rest--it was
unfamiliar wreckage. Little in common had it with the gracious portrait
in the Park Avenue hall, or the Nattier, or the Aubusson carpet, or
Felicity's rose-and-silver drawing-room. This man had chosen the
wilderness, and now the wilderness had taken him and tossed him up like
the jetsam of a flood.

There was no satisfaction for Leithen in the fact that he had been
successful in his search. By an amazing piece of luck he had found
Galliard and in so doing had achieved his purpose. But now the purpose
seemed trivial. Was this derelict of so great importance after all? The
unaccustomed bending in his handling of Galliard had given him a pain in
his back, and the smell of the retched brandy sickened him. He felt a
desperate emptiness in his body, in his soul, and in the world.

It was almost dark when Johnny and the Hares returned. Leithen jerked
his thumb towards the sleeping Galliard. Johnny nodded.

'I sort of suspicioned he'd be here. We got his tracks, but lost 'em in
the mud. The whole darned hill is a mudslide.' He spoke slowly and
flatly, as if he was very tired.

But his return set the little camp going, and Leithen realised what a
blundering amateur he was compared with Johnny and the Indians. In a few
minutes a fire was crackling before the tent door. Galliard, still in a
coma, was lifted and partly unclothed, and his damaged leg was washed
and rebandaged by Johnny with the neatness of a hospital nurse. The tent
was tidied up and supper was set cooking--coffee on the stove and
caribou steaks on the fire. Johnny concocted a dish of his own for the
sick man, for he made a kind of chicken broth from a brace of willow
grouse he had shot.

'You'd better eat,' he said. 'We'll feed the soup to that feller when he
wakes. Best let him sleep a little longer. How you feelin' yourself?
When I come in you looked mighty bad.'

'I found Galliard more than I could manage. But never mind me. What
about him?'

Johnny's bat ears seemed to prick up as he bent over the sleeping
figure. He was like a gnome in a fairy-tale; but he was human enough
when he turned to Leithen, and the glow of the fire showed his troubled
blue eyes.

'He'll come through a' right,' he said. 'He's been a healthy man and he
ain't bottomed his strength yet. But he's plumb weary. He can't have fed
proper for three days, and I reckon he can't have slept proper for a
week.'

'The wound?'

'Nasty cut he's got, and he'll have to watch hisself if he don't want to
go lame all his days. He can't move for a good spell.'

'How long?'

'Ten days--a fortnight--maybe more.'

Leithen had the appetite of a bird, but Johnny was ordinarily a good
trencherman. Tonight, however, he ate little, though he emptied the
coffee-pot. His mind was clearly on his brother, but Leithen asked no
questions. At last, after half an hour's sucking at his pipe, he spoke.

'I figure that him'--and he nodded towards Galliard--'and brother Lew
has been agreein' about as well as a carcajou and a sick b'ar. Lew'd
gotten into a bad mood, and this poor soul didn't know what the matter
was, and got no answer when he asked questions. But he was bound to hang
on to Lew or get lost and perish. Pretty nasty time he's been
havin'--Lew's been actin' mighty mean, I'd say. But you can't just blame
Lew, for, as I figure it, he don't know what he's doin'. He ain't seein'
his pal--he ain't seein' nothin' except the trail he's blazin'--and
somethin' at the end of it.'

'What's that?'

'The old Sick Heart River.'

'Then he's gone mad?'

'You might say so. And yet Lew for ordinar' is as sane as you, mister,
and a darned lot saner than me. He's gotten a vision and he's bound to
go after it.'

'What's to be done?'

'Our first job is to get this feller right. That was the reason you come
down North, wasn't it? Every man's got to skin his own skunk. But I
don't mind tellin' you I'm worried to death about brother Lew.'

The attention of both was suddenly diverted to Galliard, who had woke
up, turned on his side, and was looking at them with wide-awake
eyes--pained eyes, too, as if he had awakened to suffering. Johnny took
the pannikin of soup which had been heating on the stove, and began to
feed the sick man, feeding him far more skilfully than Leithen had done,
so that little was spilt. The food seemed to revive him and ease his
discomfort. He lay back for a little, staring upward, and then he spoke.

His voice was hoarse, little above a croak. Johnny bent over him to
catch his words. He shook his head.

'It's French, but Godamighty knows what he means. It don't sound sense
to me.'

Leithen dragged himself nearer. The man was repeating some form of words
like a litany, repeating it again and again, so that the same phrase
kept recurring. To his amazement he recognised it as a quotation from
Chateaubriand, which had impressed him long ago and which had stuck to
his fly-paper memory.

'_S'il est parmi les anges_,' the voice said, '_comme parmi des hommes,
des campagnes habites et des lieux dserts._'

There was a pause. Certain phrases followed, '_Solitudes de la terre_,'
'_Solitudes clestes._' Then the first sentence was repeated. Galliard
spoke the words in the slurred patois of Quebec, sounding harshly the
final consonants.

'He is quoting a French writer who lived a century ago,' Leithen told
Johnny. 'It's nonsense. Something about the solitary places of heaven.'

Galliard was speaking again. It was a torrent of _habitant_ French and
his voice rose to a pitch which was almost a scream. The man was under a
sudden terror, and he held out imploring hands which Johnny grasped. The
latter could follow the babble better than Leithen, but there was no
need of an interpreter, for the pain and fear in the voice told their
own tale. Then the fit passed, the eyes closed, and Galliard seemed to
be asleep again.

Johnny shook his head. 'Haywire,' he said. 'Daft--and I reckon I know
the kind of daftness. He's mortal scared of them woods. You must say the
North's gotten on his mind.'

'But it was a craze for the North that dragged him here.'

'Yep, but having gotten here he's scared of it. His mind's screwed right
round. It's a queer thing, the North, and you need to watch your step
for fear it does you down. This feller was crazy for it till he poked
his head a wee bit inside, and now he's scared out of his life and would
give his soul to quit. I've knowed it happen before. Folks come down
here thinkin' the North's a pretty lady, and find that she can be a
cruel, bloody-minded old bitch, and they scurry away from her like
jack-rabbits from a forest fire. I've seen them as had had a taste of
her ugly side, and ever after the stink of smoke-dried Indian moccasins,
and even the smell of burnin' logs would turn out their insides . . . I
reckon this feller's had a pretty purifyin' taste of it. Ever been
lost?'

'Never.'

'Well, it ain't nice, and it tests a man's guts.'

The air sharpened in the night and the little tent with its three
occupants was not too stuffy. Galliard never stirred; Johnny had the
short, sound slumbers of a woodsman, waking and rising before dawn; but
Leithen slept badly. He had found his man, but he was a lunatic--for the
time being. His task now was to piece together the broken wits. It
seemed to him a formidable and unwelcome business. Could a dying man
minister to a mind diseased? He would have preferred his old job--to go
on spending his bodily strength till he had reached the end of it. That
would, at any rate, have given him peace to make his soul.

Johnny set the camp stirring and was everywhere at once, like a good
housewife. Galliard was washed and fed and his wound dressed. Leithen
found that he had more power in his legs, and was able to make a short
promenade of the shelf on which the camp stood, breathing air which was
chilly as ice and scented with a thousand miles of pines. Johnny and the
Hares were busy with measurements.

Leithen, huddled in the lee of the fire, watched the men at work. They
were laying out the ground plan of a hut. It was to be built against the
hillside, the gravel of which, when cut away, would make its back wall,
and it seemed to be about twenty feet square. The Hares did the
levelling of the shelf, and presently came the sound of Johnny's axe
from the woods. In a couple of hours the four corner posts were cut,
trimmed, and set up, and until the midday meal all three were busy
felling well-grown spruce and pine.

Johnny's heavy preoccupation lightened a little as they ate.

'We need a hut whatever happens,' he said. 'The feller'--that was how he
referred to Galliard--'will want something snugger than a tent when the
cold sets in, for he ain't goin' to get well fast. Then there's you, a
mighty sick man. And, please God, there'll be brother Lew.'

'Is there no way of getting back to the Hares' camp?'

'For Lew and me--not for you and the feller. We got to plan to spend the
winter here, or hereabouts. We can send the Indians back for stores and
dog teams, and maybe we could get out in February when the good snows
come. But we got to plan for the winter. I can fix up a tidy hut, and
when we get the joints nicely chinked up with mud, and plenty of moss
and sods on the roof, we'll be as snug as an old b'ar in its hole. I'm
aimin' to fix a proper fireplace inside, for there's the right kind of
clay in the creek for puddlin'.'

'Let me help.'

'You can't do nothin' yet, so long as we're on the heavy jobs, but I'll
be glad of you when it comes to the inside fixin's. You get into the
tent beside the feller and sleep a bit. I'm all right if I wasn't
worried about Lew.'

Johnny was attending to the bodily needs of the sick man like a hospital
nurse, feeding him gruel and chicken broth and weak tea. Galliard slept
most of the time, and even his waking hours were a sort of coma. He was
asleep when Leithen entered the tent, and presently, to the
accompaniment of Johnny's axe in the woods, Leithen himself drowsed off,
for by this time of the day he was very weary. But sleep was for him the
thinnest of films over the waking world and presently he was roused by
Galliard's voice. This time it sounded familiar, something he had heard
before, and not the animal croak of yesterday.

Two dull brown eyes were staring at him, eyes in which there was only
the faintest spark of intelligence. They moved over his person,
lingering some time at his boots, and then fastened on his face. There
was bewilderment in them, but also curiosity. Their owner seemed to
struggle for words, and he passed his tongue over his dry lips several
times before he spoke.

'You are--what?'

He spoke in English, but his hold on the language seemed to slip, for
when Leithen replied in the same tongue the opaque eyes showed no
comprehension.

'I am a friend of your friends,' he said. 'We have come to help you. I
have the brother of Lew Frizel with me.'

After a pause he repeated the last sentence in French. Some word in it
caught Galliard's attention. His face suddenly became twisted with
anxiety, and he tried to raise himself on his bed. Words poured from
him, words tumbling over each other, the French of Quebec. He seemed to
be imploring someone to wait for him--to let him rest a little and then
he would go on--an appeal couched in queer childish language, much of
which Leithen could not understand. And always, like the keynote of a
threnody, came the word _Rivire_--and _Rivire_ again--and once
_Rivire du Coeur Malade_.

The partner of Ravelstons had suffered a strange transformation. Leithen
realised that it would be idle to try to link this man's memory with his
New York life. He had gone back into a very old world, the world of his
childhood and his ancestors, and though it might terrify him it was for
the moment his only world.

The babbling continued. As Leithen listened to it, the word that seemed
to emerge from the confusion was Lew's name. It was on Lew that
Galliard's world was now centred. If he was to be brought back to his
normal self, Lew must be the chief instrument . . . And Lew was mad
himself, raving mad, far away in the mountains on a crazy hunt for a
mystic river! A sudden sense of the lunatic inconsequence of the whole
business came over Leithen and forced from him a bitter laugh. That
laugh had an odd effect upon Galliard, for it seemed to frighten him
into silence. It was as if he had got an answer to his appeals, an
answer which slammed the door.


13

Next day the cold was again extreme, but the sun was out for six hours,
and the shelf in the forest was not uncomfortable. Johnny, after
sniffing the air, pronounced on the weather. The first snow had fallen;
there would be three days of heavy frost; then for maybe ten days there
would be a mild, bright spell; then a few weeks before Christmas would
come the big snows and the fierce cold. The fine spell would enable him
to finish the hut. A little drove of snow buntings had passed yesterday;
that meant, he said, since the birds were late in migrating, that winter
would be late.

'You call it the Indian Summer?'

'The Hares call it the White Goose Summer. It ends when the last white
goose has started south.'

That day Leithen made an experiment. Galliard was mending well, the
wound in the leg was healing, he could eat better, only his mind was
still sick. It was important to find out whether the time had come to
link his memory up with his recent past, to get him on the first stage
on the road back to the sphere to which he belonged.

He chose the afternoon, when his own fatigue compelled him to rest, and
Galliard was likely to be wakeful after the bustle of the midday meal.
He had reached certain conclusions. Galliard had lost all touch with his
recent life. He had reverted to the traditions of his family, and now
worshipped at ancestral shrines, and he had been mortally scared by the
sight of the goddess. This fear did not impel him to mere flight, for he
did not know where to flee to. It drove him to seek a refuge, and that
refuge was Lew. He was as much under the spell of Lew as Lew was under
the spell of his crazy river. Could this spell be lifted?

So far Galliard had been a mere automaton. He had spoken like a waxwork
managed by a ventriloquist. It was hardly possible to recognise a
personality in that vacant face, muffled in a shaggy beard, and unlit by
the expressionless eyes. Yet the man was regaining his health, his wound
was healing fast, his cheeks had lost their famished leanness. As
Leithen looked at him, he found it hard to refrain from bitterness. He
was giving the poor remnants of his strength to the service of a healthy
animal with years of vigour before him. He felt cruelly the frailty of
his own limbs and the hollowness of his chest.

He crushed the thought down and set himself to draw Galliard out of his
cave. But the man's wits seemed to be still wandering. Leithen plied him
with discreet questions, but got an answer to neither French nor
English. He refrained from speaking his wife's name, and the names of
his American friends, even of Ravelstons itself, woke no response. He
tried to link up with Chteau-Gaillard, and Clairefontaine--with Father
Paradis--with Uncle Augustin--with the Gaillards, Aristide and Paul
Louis, who had died on the Arctic shores. But he might have been
shouting at a cenotaph, for the man never answered, nor did any gleam of
recognition show in his face. It was only when Leithen spoke again of
Lew that there was a flicker of interest--more than a flicker, indeed,
for the name seemed to stir some secret fear; the pupils of the opaque
eyes narrowed, the lean cheeks twitched, and Galliard whimpered like a
lost dog.

Leithen felt wretchedly ill all that day, but after supper, according to
the strange fashion of his disease, he had a sudden increase of
strength. He found that he could think clearly ahead and take stock of
the position. Johnny, who had been labouring hard all day, should have
tumbled into bed after supper and slept the sleep of the just. But it
was plain that there was too much on his mind for easy slumber. He
sucked at his pipe, kept his eyes on the fire outside the open door, and
spoke scarcely a word.

'How is he getting on?' Leithen asked.

'Him? The feller? Fine, I guess. He's a mighty tough body, for he ha'nt
taken no scaith, barrin' the loss of weight. He'll be a' right.'

'But his mind is gone. He remembers nothing but what happened in the
last weeks. A shutter has come down between him and his past life. He's
a child again.'

'Aye. I've known it happen. You see he was scared out of his skin by
somethin'--it may have been Lew, or it may have been jest loneliness.
He's got no sense in him and it's goin' to take quite a time to get it
back. That's why I'm fixin' this hut. He wants nursin' and quiet, and a
sort of feel that he's safe, and for that you need four walls, even
though they're only raw lumber. If you was to take him out in the woods
you'd have him plumb ravin', and maybe he'd never get better. I've seen
the like before. It don't do to play tricks with them wild places.'

'I don't understand,' said Leithen. 'Lew goes mad and terrifies Galliard
and lets him lag behind so that he nearly perishes. Galliard has the
horror of the wilds on him, but no horror of Lew. He seems to be crying
for him like a child for his nurse.'

'That's so. That's the way it works. The feller don't know that his
troubles was all Lew's doin'. He's gotten scared of loneliness in this
darned great wild country, and he claws on to anything human. The only
human thing near at hand is brother Lew. But that ain't all. If it was
all, you and me might take Lew's place, for I guess we're human enough.
But, as I figure it, Lew has let him in on his Sick Heart daftness, and
kind of enthused him about it, and, the feller bein' sick anyhow, it has
got possession of his mind. You told me back in Quebec that he'd got a
notion, which runs in his family, of pushing north, and we seen the two
graves at Ghost River.'

'Still I don't understand,' said Leithen. 'He's frightened of the wilds
and yet he hankers to get deeper into them, right to a place where
nobody's ever been.'

Johnny shook out his pipe.

'He's not thinkin' of the Sick Heart as part of the woods. He's thinkin'
of it, the same as Lew, as a sort of Noo Jerusalem--the kind of place
where everything'll be a' right. He and Lew ain't thinkin' of it with
sane minds, and if Lew's there now he won't be lookin' at it with sane
eyes. Sick Heart is a mighty good name for it.'

'What sort of place do you think it is?'

'An ordinary creek, I reckon. It's hard to get near, and that's maybe
why Lew's crazy about it. My father used to have a sayin' that he got
out of Scotland, "Far-away hills is always shiny."'

'Then how is Galliard to be cured of this madness?'

'We've got to get Lew back to him--and Lew in his right mind. At least,
that's how I figure it. I mind once I was huntin' with the
Caribou-Eaters on the Thelon, east of Great Slave Lake. There was an
Indian boy--Two-Sticks, his name was--and he come under the spell of my
Chipewyan hunter, him they called White Partridge. Well, the trip came
to an end and we all went home, but next year I heard that Two-Sticks
had been queer all winter. He wasn't cured until they fetched old White
Partridge to him, and that meant a three-hundred-mile trip from Nelson
Forks to the Snowdrift River.'

'How can we get Lew back?'

'Godamighty knows! If I was here on my own I'd be on his trail like a
timber wolf. Maybe he's sick in body as well as in mind. Anyhow, he's
alone, and it ain't good to be alone down North, and he's all that's
left to me in the family line. But I can't leave here. I took on a job
with you and I've got to go through with it. There's the feller, too,
to nurse, and he'll want a tidy bit o' nursin'. And there's you, mister.
You're a pretty sick man.'

'Go after Lew and fetch him back and I'll stay here.'

Johnny shook his head.

'Nothin' doin'. You can't finish this hut. The Hares are willin' enough,
but they've got to be told what to do. And soon there'll be need of
huntin' for fresh supplies, for so far we've been livin' mostly on what
we back-packed in. And we've got to send out to the Hares' camp for some
things. Besides, you ain't used to the woods, and what's easy for me
would be one big trouble for you. But most of all you're sick--God-awful
sick--a whole lot sicker than the feller. So I say, 'nothin' doin',
though I'm sure obliged to you. We've got to carry on with our job and
trust to God to keep an eye on brother Lew.'

Leithen did not reply. There was a stubborn, sagacious dutifulness in
that bullet head, that kindly Scots face, and those steadfast blue eyes
which was beyond argument.


14

He spent a restless night, for he felt that the situation was slipping
out of his control. He had come here to expend the last remnants of his
bodily strength in a task on which his mind could dwell, and so escape
the morbidity of passively awaiting death. He had fulfilled part of that
task, but he was as yet a long way from success. Galliard's mind had
still to be restored to its normal groove. This could only be done--at
least so Johnny said--by fetching and restoring to sanity the man who
was the key to its vagaries. Johnny could not be spared, so why should
he not go himself on Lew's trail, with one of the Hares to help him? It
was misery to hang about this camp, feeling his strength ebbing and
getting no farther on with his job. That would be dying like a rat in a
hole. If it had to be, far better to have found a hole among the
comforts of home. If he followed Lew he would at any rate die in his
boots, and whether he succeeded or failed the end would come while he
was fighting.

He told Johnny of his decision and at first was derided. He would not
last two days; a Hare might be a good enough tracker, but he wanted a
white man to guide him, one who was no novice; the road to the Sick
Heart was admittedly difficult and could only be traversed, if at all,
by a fit man; there might be storms and the mountains made impassable.
Moreover, what would he say to Lew, to whom he was a stranger? If Lew
was found, he would for certain resent any intrusion in his lair. This
was the point to which Johnny always returned.

'You've heard of mad trappers and the trouble they give the Mounties. If
Lew's mad, he'll shoot, and he don't miss.'

'I know all that,' said Leithen, 'and I've made my book for it. You must
understand that anyhow I am going to die pretty soon. If I hurry on my
death a little in an honest way, I won't be the loser. That's how I look
at it. If I never get to Lew, and perish on the road, why, that's that.
If I find Lew and his gun finds me, well, that's that. There is just the
odd chance that I may persuade him to be reasonable and bring him back
here, and that is a chance I'm bound to take. Don't you worry about me,
for I tell you I'm taking the easiest way. Since I've got to die, I want
to die standing.'

Johnny held out his hand. 'You got me beat, mister. Lew and myself ain't
reckoned timid folk, but for real sand there's not your like on this
darned continent.'


15

Leithen found the ascent of the first ridge from the valley bottom a
stern business, for Lew had not zigzagged for ease, but had cut his
blazes in the straight line of a crow's flight. But once at the top the
road led westerly along a crest, the trees thinned out, and he had a
prospect over an immense shining world.

The taller of the Hares, the one he called Big Klaus, was his companion.
He himself travelled light, carrying little except a blanket and extra
clothing, but the Indian had a monstrous pack which seemed in no way to
incommode him. He had the light tent (the hut being now far enough
advanced to move Galliard into it), a rifle and shotgun, axes,
billy-can, kamiks to replace moccasins, and two pairs of snowshoes. The
last were of a type new to Leithen--not the round 'bear-paws' of eastern
Canada made for the deep snow of the woods, but long narrow things, very
light, constructed of two separate rods joined by a toe-piece, and
raised in front at a sharp angle. The centres were of coarse _babiche_
with a large mesh, so as to pick up the least amount of snow, and, since
the meshing entered the frame by holes and was not whipped round it,
the wooden surface was as smooth as skis. On such shoes, Johnny said, an
active man could travel forty miles in a day.

Once the ridge had been gained, Leithen found that his breath came a
little more easily. He seemed to have entered a world where the purity
of the air was a positive thing; not the mere absence of impure matter,
but the quintessence of all that was vital in nature. The Indian Summer
forecast by Johnny had begun. There was a shuddering undercurrent of
cold, but the sun shone, and though it gave light rather than warmth, it
took much of the bleakness out of the landscape. Also there was no wind.
The huge amphitheatre, from the icy summit of the central peak to the
gullies deep-cut in the black volcanic rock, was as quiet as a summer
millpond. Yet there was nothing kindly in this peace; it seemed
unnatural, as if the place were destined for strife. On the scarps the
little spruces were bent and ragged with the winds, and the many bald
patches were bleached by storms. This cold, raw, hilltop world was not
made for peace; its temporary gentleness was a trap to lure the unwary
into its toils.

It was not difficult to follow Lew's blazes, and in a little swamp they
found his tracks. He must be a bigger man than Johnny, Leithen thought,
or else heavily laden, for the footprints went deep.

The Hare plodded steadily on with his queer in-toed stride. He could
talk some English, and would answer questions, but he never opened a
conversation. He was a merciful man, and kept turning in his tracks to
look at Leithen, and when he thought he seemed weary promptly dropped
his pack and squatted on the ground. His methods of cooking and camping
were not Johnny's, but in their way they were efficient. At the midday
and evening meals he had a fire going at miraculous speed with his flint
and steel and pink-box, and he could make a good bed even of comfortless
spruce boughs. His weapon was a cheap breechloader obtained from some
trader, and with it he managed to shoot an occasional partridge or
ptarmigan, so that Leithen had his bowl of soup. The second night out he
made a kind of Dutch oven and roasted a porcupine, after parboiling it,
and he cooked ashcakes which were nearly as palatable as the pease-meal
bannocks which Leithen had eaten in his youth.

That second night he talked. It had been a melancholy summer, for it had
been foretold that many of the Hare people would presently die, and the
whole tribe had fasted and prepared for their end. The manner of death
had not been predicted--it might be famine, or disaster, or a stupendous
storm. They had been scolded for this notion by Father Duplessis at Fort
Bannerman and by Father Wentzel at the mountain camp, and before the end
of the summer the spirits of the tribe had risen, and most believed that
the danger had passed. But not all; some wise men thought that bad
trouble was coming in the winter.

'It is not good to wait too long on death,' said Big Klaus. 'Better that
it should come suddenly when it is not expected.' He looked reflectively
at Leithen as if he knew that here was one who was in the same case as
the Hares.

For three days they followed the network of ridges according to Lew's
blazing. They seemed rarely to lose elevation, for they passed gullies
and glens by the scarps at their headwaters. But nevertheless they had
been steadily descending, for the great rift where the Sick Heart was
believed to flow was no longer in the prospect, and the hanging
glaciers, the ice couloirs and artes, and the poised avalanches of the
central peak now overhung and dominated the landscape.

It was a strange world through which Leithen stumbled, conserving his
strength greedily and doling it out like a miser. There was sun, light,
no great cold, no wind; but with all these things there was no kindness.
Something had gone out of the air and that something was hope. Night was
closing down, a long night from which there would be a slow wakening.
Scarcely a bird could be seen, and there were no small, innocent,
frightened beasts to scurry into hiding. Everything that could move had
gone to sanctuary against the coming wrath. The tattered pines, the
bald, blanched pastures, were no more a home for life than the pinnacles
of intense ice that glittered in mid-heaven. Dawn came punctually, and
noon, and nightfall, and yet the feeling was of a perpetual twilight.

In these last weeks Leithen's memory seemed to have become a closed
book. He never thought of his past, and no pictures from it came to
cheer or torture him. He might have been like the Hare, knowing no other
world than this of laborious days and leaden nights. A new discomfort
scarcely added to his misery, and food and fine weather did not lighten
it. Every hour he was looking at marvels of natural beauty and
magnificence, but they did not affect him. Life now awoke no response
in him, and he remembered that some wise man had thus defined death. The
thought gave him a queer comfort. He was already dead; there only
remained the simple snapping of the physical cord.


16

They came on it suddenly in the afternoon of the third day. The scraggy
forest of jackpines, which seemed to stretch to the very edge of the
snows, suddenly gave place to empty air, and Leithen found himself
staring breathlessly not up, but down--down into a chasm nearly a mile
wide and two thousand feet deep. From his feet the ground fell away in
screes to a horizontal rib of black rock, below which, in a blue mist
very far down, were the links of a river. Beyond it were meadows and
woods, and the woods were not of scrub-pine, but of tall timber--from
one or two trees in scattered clumps he judged them to be a hundred feet
high. Beyond them again the opposite wall rose sheer to fantastic
aiguilles of dark rock. He was looking at some mighty volcanic rift
which made a moat to the impregnable castle of the snows.

The strength seemed to go from his limbs, and he collapsed among the
crowberries and pine cones. He fumbled in a pocket to find his single
Zeiss glass, but gave up the search when he realised the weakness of his
hands. This sudden vision had drained the power from his body by its
intense quickening of his senses and mind. It seemed to him that he was
looking at the most marvellous spectacle ever vouchsafed to man. The
elements were commonplace--stone and wood, water and earth--but so had
been the pigments of a Raphael. The celestial Demiurge had combined them
into a masterpiece.

He lay full in the pale sun and the air was mild and mellow. As his eyes
thirstily drank in the detail he saw that there was little colour in the
scene. Nearly all was subfusc, monochrome, and yet so exquisite was the
modelling that there was nothing bleak in it; the impression rather was
of a chaste, docile luxuriance. The valley bottom, so far as he could
see it, seemed to be as orderly as a garden. The Sick Heart was like a
Highland salmon river, looping itself among pools and streams with wide
beaches of pebbles, beaches not black like the enclosing cliffs, but
shining white. Along its course, and between the woods, were meadows of
wild hay, now a pale russet against the ripple of the stream and the
evergreen of the trees . . . Something from his past awoke in Leithen.
He was far up in the Arctic North; winter had begun, and even in this
false summer the undercurrent of cold was stinging his fingers through
his mitts. But it was not loneliness or savagery that was the keynote of
this valley. Pastoral breathed from it; it was comforting and habitable.
He could picture it in its summer pride, a symphony of mild airs and
singing waters. Stripped and blanched as it was, it had a preposterous
suggestion of green meadows and Herrick and sheep.

'We'll camp here,' he told Big Klaus. 'There's nothing to show us the
road down. It'll take some finding.'

He found the Zeiss glass at last and tried to make out further details.
There must be hot springs, he thought, natural in a volcanic country;
that would explain the richness of the herbage. The place, too, was
cunningly sheltered from the prevailing winds, and probably most of the
river that he could see never froze. That would mean wild fowl and fish,
even in the depths of winter . . . He pocketed his glass, for he did not
want to learn more. He was content with what he saw. No wonder the
valley had cast its spell on the old Indian chief and on Lew Frizel. It
was one of those sacred places on which Nature had so lavished her art
that it had the magic of a shrine.

Big Klaus made camp in a little half-moon of shingle on the verge of the
cliffs, with trees to shelter it on north and east. He built an enormous
fire on a basis of split wood, piled like a little wigwam, and felled
two spruces so that they met in the centre of the heap, and as their
ends burned away would slip farther down and keep alight without tending
until morning.

'It will be very cold,' said the Hare, sniffing towards the north like a
pointer dog.

Leithen ate little at supper, for his mind was in a fever. He had won a
kind of success as he was nearing the brink of death, for he had found
something which other men had longed to find and about which the world
knew nothing. Some day there would be books of travel and guidebooks,
and inevitably it would be written that among the discoverers of the
secret valley was one Edward Leithen, who had once been His Majesty's
Attorney-General in England, and who died soon afterwards . . . This
unexpected feat obscured the fact that he had also found Galliard, for,
setting out on one task, he had accidentally accomplished a greater,
like Saul, the son of Kish, who, seeking his father's asses, stumbled
upon a kingdom.

The big fire roared and crackled at the mouth of the little tent, and
beyond it was a blue immensity, sapphire in the mid-heavens, but of a
milky turquoise above the mountains where the moon was rising.

He fell asleep early, and awoke after midnight to a changing world. The
fire had sunk, but it was still fierce around the point where the spruce
trunks intersected. The moon had set and the sky was hung with stars and
planets--not inlaid, but hung, for the globes of sheer light were
patently suspended in the heavens, and it seemed as if the eye could see
behind them into aboriginal darkness. The air had suddenly become
bitterly cold, cold almost beyond bearing. The shudder which had for
some days lurked behind the sunlight had sharpened to an icy rigour.
Frost like a black concrete was settling over everything, gumming the
eyes and lips together. He buried his head under his blankets, but could
not get warm again . . .

Some time towards dawn he fell into an uneasy sleep. When he awoke Big
Klaus was tending the fire, white as an icicle and bent double against
the fury of a northwest wind. Snow was drifting in flakes like a
pigeon's egg. With a bound winter had come upon them.

Movement was impossible, and the two men lay all day in the tent,
Leithen half in a stupor, for the sudden onrush of cold seemed to have
drained the remnants of his strength. With the snow the first rigour
abated, and presently the wind sank, and the smoke of the fire no
longer choked the tent. The Hare split wood and rose every hour or so to
tend the fire; for the rest he dozed, but he had a clock in his brain
and he was never behindhand in his stoking. There was no fresh meat, so
he cooked bacon and camp biscuit for luncheon, and for supper made a
wonderful stew of tinned bully-beef and beans.

At twilight the snow ceased, and with the dark the cold deepened. The
silence deepened, too, except for trees cracking in the fierce stricture
of the frost.

Leithen had regained some vitality during the day, enough to let him
plan ahead. It was his business to get down into the valley where,
beyond question, Lew had preceded him. It would be hard to find Lew's
route, for there were no trees to blaze, and the weather of the past
week would have obliterated his trail. To a mountaineer's eye it seemed
an ugly place to descend, for the rock did not fissure well into
footholds and hand-grips. But the snow might solve the problem. The wind
from the northwest had plastered it against the eastern side of the
valley, the side on which they had made camp. It must have filled the
couloirs and made it possible to get down by step-cutting or glissade.
He had only two fears--whether his body was not too feeble, and whether
the Hare was sufficient of a mountaineer for the attempt.

Morning brought no fresh snow, and the extreme cold seemed to slacken.
Leithen thought that it could not be more than ten degrees below zero.
Having an immediate practical task before him, he found himself
possessed of a certain energy. He ate his meagre breakfast almost with
relish, and immediately after was on his feet. There must be no delay in
getting down into the valley.

With Big Klaus he explored the rim of the cliffs, following the valley
downward, as he was certain Lew had done. Mercifully it was easy going,
for with the trees withdrawn from the scarp, there was no tangle of
undergrowth, and what normally might have been loose screes was now firm
snow.

For a little the cliffs overhung or fell sheer. Then came fissures by
which, in open weather, a trained mountaineer might have descended, but
which now were ice-choked and impossible. Leithen had walked more than a
mile and come very near the limit of his strength before he found what
he sought. The rocks fell back into a V-shaped bay, and down the bay to
the valley floor swept a great wave of snow, narrow at the top and
spreading out fan-wise beneath. The angle was not more than thirty or
thirty-five degrees. This must have been Lew's route, and no doubt he
had had to face awkward rock-falls and over-hangs which now were
obliterated in one great smooth white swirl. Leithen got out his glass
and searched the lower slopes. No, there seemed to be no snags there; a
good skier would tackle the descent without a thought.

'We must shift our stuff here,' he told the Hare. 'But first make a fire
or I shall freeze.'

He cowered beside the blaze until Big Klaus had brought up the camp
baggage. They cooked the midday meal, and then ransacked the stores.
There was rope, but not enough of it. First they must pack their kit so
that it would be kept together in the descent, for Leithen knew what a
sepulchre snowdrifts could be for a man's belongings. Then he would have
liked another hundred feet of rope for the Hare and himself. He meant to
go down slowly and carefully, feeling his way and humouring his wretched
body.

The baggage took up every inch of rope. Leithen had the gun and rifle
lashed on his own back, and the rest made up a huge bundle which was
attached to Big Klaus and himself by short lengths of cord. It was the
best he could do, but it was an unwieldy contraption, and he prayed that
there might be no boulders or pockets in the imperfectly seen lower
reaches, for it would be impossible to steer a course. The Hare was sent
into the wood to cut two long poles. He did not seem to realise the
purpose until he returned and Leithen explained what must be done.

'The snow is firm enough,' he said. 'It will give good footholds. One
step at a time, remember, and we must never move together. I stand still
when you move. For God's sake, keep your balance. If you slip, turn on
your face and dig in your hands and feet. Don't let the kit pull you out
of your steps. You understand?'

He repeated the instructions several times, but Big Klaus stared at him
dully. When at last he realised that it was proposed to descend the
chute, he shook his head violently. He patted his stomach and made the
motions of one about to be sick. Twice he went to the edge and peered
down, and each time there was something like panic in his heavy eyes.

'Come on! There's no time to be lost. Even if we roll all the way it
won't kill us.'

Leithen took two steps down, leaning inward as he moved.

'Come on, you fool!'

The Hare put out a foot, like a timid bather in cold water. He was a
brave man, for, though he was mortally afraid, he kept his eyes away
from the void and imitated Leithen in hugging the slope.

At first all went well. The grade was steeper than had appeared above,
but not much, and, though the baggage wobbled and swayed, they managed
to keep their balance.

They had emerged from the throat of the couloir, and were out on the fan
of the lower and easier slopes when disaster overtook them. The Hare
miscalculated a foothold at a place where there was glazed ice on the
snow, and shot downward on his back. He, and the weight of the baggage,
plucked Leithen from his stance, and the next second the whole outfit
had started a mad glissade. The rope round Leithen's middle choked the
breath out of him. He cannoned into the baggage and ricocheted off; he
cannoned into Big Klaus; his mouth and eyes were choked with snow; some
rib of rock or ice caught his thigh and hurt him . . . Once, climbing at
Courmayeur alone, he had slipped on a snowfield and been whirled to what
he believed to be his end in a bergschrund (which happened to be nearly
full of snow) into which he had dropped comfortably. Now once again,
before his senses left him, he had the same certainty of death and the
same apathy . . .

17

He recovered consciousness to find the Hare attempting a kind of rough
massage of his lean chest. For a minute or two he lay comatose,
breathing heavily, but not suffering pain except for his bruised thigh.
Slowly, with immense difficulty, he tested his body for damage. There
seemed to be little--no concussion--the bruise--the breath knocked out
of him, but returning under the Hare's ministrations. It was not until
he tried to get to his feet that he realised how much the glissade had
taken toll of his strength.

The valley bottom was like a new creation, for the whole flavour of the
landscape was changed. It was no longer the roof of the world where the
mind and eye were inured to far horizons, but a place enclosed, muffled,
defended by great rock bastions from the bleak upper air. Against the
eastern wall the snow lay piled in big drifts, but there was no snow on
the western side and very little in the intervening meadows. In these
same meadows there was what looked like frozen pools, but the rigour of
the frost had not touched the whole river, for below one of the patches
of forest there was a gleam of running water. There was not a breath of
wind, the slanting sunlight gilded the russet grasses and snow patches,
the air was unbelievably mild. Here in this fantastic sanctuary was
nothing of North America. Apart from the sheer containing walls, the
scene might have been a Northumbrian pasture in an English December.

But all the pith had gone out of him. It seemed as if the strain of the
descent had damaged some nerve control, for his weakness was worse than
pain. He struggled to his feet and clutched at the Hare to keep himself
from falling. The latter had got the baggage straightened out and was
restrapping the guns. He nodded down the valley--

'He has gone that way,' he said. But how he had guessed Lew's route he
did not tell, nor did the other enquire.

For to Leithen it looked as if in this strange place he had got very
near his journey's end. He toiled in the wake of the Hare for something
less than a mile, counting each step, utterly oblivious of anything but
the dun herbage underfoot. He tried to step in the Indian's prints, but
found them too long for his enfeebled legs. He who had once had the
stride of a mountaineer now teetered like an affected woman. He made
little bets with himself--how many steps until he fell?--would Big Klaus
turn back, see his distress and stop of his own accord? . . . The latter
guess was right. The Indian, turning, saw a face like death, and
promptly flung down his pack and announced that he would make camp.

There was a patch of gravel where the stream made a sharp bend, and
there, in the lee of a tall coppice, a fire was lit. The Hare had to
loosen the light pack from Leithen's shoulders, for he had lost all
muscular power. His fingers seemed to bend back on him if he tried to
lift a blanket. Also his breath was so troublesome that in that open
place he panted like a man suffocating in a hole. The fit passed, and by
the time the tent was up and the beds laid, his main trouble was his
desperate weakness. Big Klaus fed him for supper with gruel and strong
tea, but he was able to swallow little. His throat was as impotent as
his hands and legs.

But his mind was no longer wholly apathetic, for he had stumbled on a
queer corner of recollection. He had been conscious of the apathy of his
memory, for, had he been able to choose, he would have been glad in
those evil days to 'count his mercies,' to remember with a wry
satisfaction the many pleasant things in his life. No present misery
could kill his gratitude for past joys. But the past had remained a
closed book to him, and he had had no thoughts except for the moment.

Now suddenly, with blinding clearness, he saw a picture. Outside his
bedroom door, in a passage on the upper floor of the old Scots country
house of his boyhood, there had hung a print. It was a Munich
photogravure called _Die Toteninsel_, and showed an island of tall
cliffs, and within their angle a grove of cypresses, while a barge full
of bent and shrouded figures approached this home of the dead. The place
was Sick Heart Valley--the same sheer cliffs, the same dark, evergreen
trees; the Hare and he, bowed and muffled figures, were approaching the
graveyard . . . As a boy he had been puzzled by the thing, but had
rather liked it. As he dashed out on a spring morning, its sombreness
had pleased him by its contrast with his own sunlit world . . . Now,
though he saw the picture of those April days, he could not recapture
the faintest flavour of that spring rapture. He saw only the dark
photogravure on the distempered passage wall, and his interest was
faintly touched by its likeness to his present environment . . . Surely
he was already dead, for he had ceased to react to life!

Through the open tent door he could see the northern heavens ablaze with
the aurora. The frost was closing down again, for the Dancers seemed to
give out a crackling sound, as if the sky were the back-cloth of a stage
with the painted canvas strained to cracking point. The spectacle did
not stir his apathy. This blanched world was rioting in colour, but it
was still blanched and bleached, the enemy of all life.

As he lay wakeful, scarcely conscious of the dull pain in his chest or
of the spasms in his breathing, but desperately aware of his weakness,
he felt the shadow of eternity deepening over him. Like Job, the last
calamities had come to him. Thank Heaven, he was free from loquacious
friends! Like Job he bowed his head and had no impulse to rebel. The
majesty of God filled his universe. He was coming face to face with his
religion.

He had always been in his own way a religious man. Brought up under the
Calvinistic shadow, he had accepted a simple evangel which, as he grew
older, had mellowed and broadened. At Oxford he had rationalised it in
his philosophical studies, but he had never troubled to make it a
self-sufficing, logical creed. Certain facts were the buttresses of his
faith, and the chief of them was the omnipotence and omnipresence of
God. He had always detested the glib little humanism of most of his
contemporaries.

But his creed had remained something aloof from his life. He had no
communion with the omnipotent God and no craving for it. It rarely
impinged on his daily experience. When things went well, he felt a dim
gratitude to Omnipotence; when badly, it was a comfort to tell himself
that it was God's will and to take misfortune cheerfully. In the War it
had been different. Then he felt a relation so close as to be almost
communion--that he was not only under God's ultimate command, but under
His direct care. That was why his nerves had been so steady. It was
foolish to worry about what was preordained.

Then had come long years of spiritual sloth. The world had been too much
with him. But certain habits had continued. Still in his heart he had
praised God for the pleasures of life, and had taken disappointments
with meekness, as part of a divine plan. Always, when he reflected, he
had been conscious of being a puppet in almighty hands. So he had never
been much cast down or much puffed up. He had passed as a modest man--a
pose, some said; a congenital habit, said others. His friends had told
him that if he had only pushed himself he might have been Prime
Minister. Foolish! These things were ordained.

Now his castles had been tumbled down. Pleasant things they had been,
even if made of pasteboard; in his heart he had always known that they
were pasteboard. Here was no continuing city. God had seen fit to change
the sunlight for a very dark shadow. Well, under the shadow he must not
quail, but keep his head high, not in revolt or in defiance, but because
He who had made him in His image expected such courage. 'Though Thou
slay me, yet will I trust in Thee.'

There was no shade of grievance in Leithen's mind, still less
self-pity. There was almost a grim kind of gratitude. He was now alone
with God. In these bleak immensities the world of man had fallen away to
an infinite distance, and the chill of eternity was already on him. He
had no views about an after life. That was for God's providence to
decree. He was an atom in infinite space, the humblest of slaves waiting
on the command of an august master.

He remembered a phrase of Cromwell's about putting his mouth in the
dust. That was his mood now, for he felt above everything his
abjectness. In his old bustling world there were the works of man's
hands all around to give a false impression of man's power. But here the
hand of God had blotted out life for millions of miles and made a great
tract of the inconsiderable ball which was the earth like the infinite
interstellar spaces which had never heard of man.


18

He woke to a cold which seemed to sear that part of his face which the
blanket left exposed. There was a great rosy light all about the tent
which the frost particles turned into a sparkling mist.

The Hare stood above him.

'There is a man,' he said. 'Beyond the river under the rocks. I have
seen a smoke.'

The news gave Leithen the extra incentive that made it possible for him
to rise. He hung on to the Hare's shoulder, and it was in that posture
that he drank some strong tea and swallowed a mouthful of biscuit. The
smoke, he was told, was perhaps a mile distant in a nook of the cliffs.
The long pool of the river was frozen hard, and beyond it was open
ground.

Leithen's strength seemed suddenly to wax. A fever had taken him, a
fever to be up and doing, to finish off his business once for all. His
weakness was almost a physical anguish, and there was a horrid
background of nausea . . . But what did it all matter? He was very near
his journey's end. One way or another in a few hours he would be quit of
his misery.

The Hare guided him--indeed, half-carried him--over the frozen hummocks
of the pool. Beyond was a slight rise and from that a thin spire of
smoke could be seen in an angle of the cliffs. In the shelter of the
rise Leithen halted.

'You must stay here,' he told the Indian, 'and see what happens to me.
If I am killed, you will go back to where we came from and tell my
friend what has happened. He may want to come here, and in that case you
will show him the road. If I do not die now, you will make camp for
yourself a little way off and at dawn tomorrow you will come where the
smoke is. If I am alive, you may help me. If I am dead, you must return
to my friend. Do you understand?'

The Hare shook his head. The orders seemed to be unacceptable, and
Leithen had to repeat them again before he nodded in acquiescence.

'Good-bye,' he said. 'God bless you for an honest man.'

The turf was frozen hard, but it was as level as a croquet lawn and
made easy walking. All Leithen's attention was concentrated on his crazy
legs. They wobbled and shambled and sprawled, and each step was a
separate movement which had to be artfully engineered. He took to
counting them--ten, twenty, thirty, one hundred. He seemed to have made
no progress. Two hundred, three hundred--here he had to scramble in and
out of a small watercourse--four hundred, five hundred.

A cry made him lift his eyes, and he saw a man perhaps two hundred yards
distant.

The man was shouting, but he could not hear what he said. A horrid
nausea was beginning to afflict him--the over-powering sickness which
comes to men who reach the extreme limits of their strength. Then there
was a sound which was not the human voice, and something sang not far
from his left shoulder. He had taken perhaps six further steps when the
same something passed somewhere on his right.

His dulled brain told him the meaning of it. 'He must be bracketing,' he
said to himself. 'The third shot will get me in the heart or the head,
and then all will be over.' He found himself longing for it as a sick
man longs for the morning. But it did not come. Instead came the nausea
and the extremity of weakness. The world swam in a black mist, and
strength fled from his limbs, like air from a slit bladder.


19

When Leithen's weakness overpowered him, he might lose consciousness,
but when he regained it there was no halfway house of dim perception to
return to. He alternated between a prospect of acid clarity and no
prospect at all . . . Now he took in every detail of the scene, though
he was puzzled at first to interpret them.

At first he thought that it was night and that he was lying
out-of-doors, for he seemed to be looking up to a dark sky. Then a
splash of light on his left side caught his attention, and he saw that
it outlined some kind of ceiling. But it was a ceiling which lacked at
least one supporting wall, for there was a great blue vagueness pricked
out with points of light, and ruddy in the centre with what looked like
flames. It took him some time to piece together the puzzle . . . He was
in a cave, and towards the left he was looking to the open where a big
fire was burning.

There was another light, another fire, it seemed. This was directly in
front of him, but he could not see the flames, only the glow on floor
and roof, so that it must be burning beyond a projecting rib of rock.
There must be a natural flue there, he thought, an opening in the roof,
for there was no smoke to make his eyes smart.

He was lying on a pile of spruce boughs covered with a Hudson's Bay
blanket. There was a bitter taste on his lips as he passed his tongue
over them--brandy or whisky, it seemed; anyhow, some kind of spirits.
Somebody, too, had been attending to him, for the collar of his dicky
had been loosened, and he was wearing an extra sweater which was not his
own. Also his moccasins had been removed and his feet rolled snugly in a
fold of the blanket . . .

Presently a man came into the light of the inner fire. The sight of him
awoke Leithen to a memory of the past days. This could only be Lew
Frizel, whom he had come to find--a man who had gone mad, according to
his brother's view, for he had left Galliard to perish; one who a few
hours back had beyond doubt shot at him. Then he had marched forward
without a tremor, expecting a third bullet to find his heart, for it
would have been a joyful release. Now, freed from the extreme misery of
weakness, he found himself nervous about this brother of Johnny's--why,
he did not know, for his own fate was beyond caring about. Lew's
madness, whatever it was, could not be wholly malevolent, for he had
taken some pains to make comfortable the man he had shot at. Besides, he
was the key to Galliard's sanity, and Galliard was the purpose of his
quest.

Lew was a far bigger man than Johnny, not less, it appeared, than six
feet two; a lean man, and made leaner by his dress, which was deerskin
breeches, a tanned caribou shirt worn above a jersey, and a lumberman's
laced boots. His hair, as flaxen as a girl's, had been self-cut into a
bunch and left a ridiculous fringe on his forehead. It was only the
figure he saw, a figure apparently of immense power and activity, for
every movement was like the releasing of a spring.

The man glanced towards him and saw that he was awake. He lit a lantern
with a splinter from the fire, and came forward so that Leithen could
see his face. Plainly he was Johnny's brother, for there was the same
shape of head, and the same bat's ears. But his eyes were a world apart.
Johnny's were honest, featureless pools of that indistinct colour which
is commonly called blue or grey, but Lew's were as brilliant as jewels,
pale, but with the pallor of intense delicate colour, the hue of a
turquoise, but clear as a sapphire, and with an adamantine brilliance.
They were masterful, compelling eyes, wild, but to Leithen not mad--at
least, it was the madness of a poet and not of a maniac.

He bent his big shoulders and peered into Leithen's face. There was
nothing of the Indian in him, except the round head and the bat's ears.
The man was more Viking, with his great high-bridged nose, his straight,
bushy eyebrows, his long upper lip, and his iron chin. He was
clean-shaved, too, unlike his brother, who was as shaggy as a bear. The
eyes devoured Leithen, puzzled, in a way contemptuous, but not hostile.

'Who are you? Where do you come from?'

The voice was the next surprise. It was of exceptional beauty, soft,
rich, and musical, and the accent was not Johnny's _lingua-franca_ of
all North America. It was a gentle, soothing Scots, like the speech of a
Border shepherd.

'I came with Johnny--your brother. He's in camp three days' journey
back. We've found Galliard, the man who was with you. He was pretty sick
and wanted nursing.'

'Galliard!' The man rubbed his eyes. 'I lost him--he lost hisself. Come
to think of it, he wasn't much of a pal. Too darned slow. I had to hurry
on.'

He lowered his blazing splinter and scanned Leithen's thin face and
hollow eyes and temples. He looked at the almost transparent wrist. He
lifted the blanket and put his head close to his chest so that he could
hear his breathing.

'What brought you here?' he asked fiercely. 'You haven't got no right
here.'

'I came to find you . . . Galliard needs you. And Johnny.'

'You took a big risk.'

'I'm a dying man, so risk doesn't matter.'

'You're over Jordan now. The Sick Heart is where you come to when you're
at the end of your road . . . I had a notion it was the River of the
Water of Life, same as in Revelation.'

The man's eyes seemed to have lost their glitter and become pools of
melancholy.

'Well, it ain't. It's the River of the Water of Death. The Indians know
that and they only come here to die. Some, at least; but it isn't many
that gets here, it being a dam' rough road.'

He took Leithen's hand in his gigantic paw.

'You're sick. Terrible sick. You've got what the Hares call _tfitsiki_
and white folk T.B. We don't suffer from it anything to signify, but
it's terrible bad among the Indians. It's poor feeding does it with
them, but that's not what's hurting you. Where d'you come from? Edmonton
way? Or New York like the man Galliard?'

'I come from England. I'm Scots, same as you.'

'That's mighty queer. You've come down North to look for Galliard? He's
a sick man, too, sick in his mind, but he'll cure. You're another
matter. You've a long hill to climb and I doubt if you'll win to the top
of it.'

'I know. I'm dying. I made my book for that before I left England.'

'And you're facing up to it. There's guts left in the old land. What's
your name? Leithen! That's south country. We Frizels come from the
north.'

'I've seen Johnny's ring with the Fraser arms.'

'What's brother John thinking about me?'

'He's badly scared. He had to stay to attend to Galliard, and it's
partly to ease his mind that I pushed on here.'

'I guess his mind wanted some easing. Johnny's thinking about mad
trappers. Well, maybe he's right. I was as mad as a loon until this
morning . . . I've been looking for the Sick Heart River since I was a
halfling, and Galliard come along and gave me my chance at last. God
knows what _he_ was looking for, but he fell in with me all right, and I
treated him mighty selfish. I was mad, and I don't mind telling you.
That's the way the Sick Heart takes people. I thought when I found it
I'd find a New Jerusalem with all my sins washed away, and the angels
waiting for me . . . Then you come along. I shot at you, not to kill,
but to halt you--when I shoot to kill, I reckon I don't miss. And you
came on quite regardless, and that shook me. Here, I says, is someone
set on the Sick Heart, and he's going to get there. And then you tumbled
down in a heap, and I reckoned you were going to die anyway.'

Lew was speaking more quietly and the light had gone from his eyes.

'Something sort of clicked inside my head,' he went on, 'and I began to
look differently at things. The sight of you sort of cleared my mind.
One thing I know--this is the River of the Water of Death. You can't
live in this valley. There's no life here. Not a bird or beast, not a
squirrel in the woods, not a rabbit in the grass, let alone bear or
deer.'

'There are warm springs,' Leithen said. 'There must be duck there.'

'Devil a duck! I looked to find the sedges full of them, geese and ducks
that the Eskimos and Indians had hurt and that couldn't move south.
Devil a feather! And devil a fish in the river! When God made this place
He wasn't figuring on humans taking up lots in it . . . I got a little
provender, but if you and I don't shift we'll be dead in a week.'

'What have you got?'

'A hindquarter of caribou--lean, stringy meat--a couple of bags of
flour--maybe five pounds of tea.'

'There's an Indian with me,' said Leithen. 'He's gone to earth a mile or
so back. I told him to wait to see what happened to me. He'll be hanging
about tomorrow morning, and he's got some food.'

Lew rapped out a dozen questions, directed to identifying the Hare.
Finally he settled who he was and gave him a name.

'What's he got?' he demanded.

'Flour and oatmeal and bacon and tea, and some stuff in tins. Enough for
a week or so.'

'That's no good,' said Lew bitterly. 'We got to winter here or perish.
Man, d'you not see we're in a trap? Nothing that hasn't wings could get
out of this valley.'

'How did you get in?'

Lew smiled grimly. 'God knows! I was mad, as I told you. I found a kind
of crack with tree roots and creepers. The snow hadn't come yet. I fell
the last forty feet, but by God's mercy it was into a clump of
scrub-cedar. I lost nothing except half my kit and the skin of my face.
But now the snow is here and that door is shut.'

'The Hare and I came down by the snow, and it's the snow that's going to
help us out again.'

Lew looked at him with unbelief in his eyes.

'You're a sick man--sick in the head, too. Likewise you're tireder than
a flighting woodcock. You've got to sleep. I'm going to shift your bed
farther out. Frost won't be bad tonight, and you want the air round you.
See, I'll give you another blanket.'

Leithen saw that Lew was robbing his own bed, but he was too feeble to
protest. He dropped straightaway into the fathomless depths of exhausted
sleep.

When he woke, with rime on his blankets and sunlight in his eyes, he saw
that the Hare had been retrieved and was now attending to the breakfast
fire. For a little he lay motionless, puzzling over what had happened to
him. As always now at the start of a day, he felt wretchedly ill, and
this morning had been no exception. But his eyes were seeing things
differently . . . Hitherto the world had seemed to him an etching
without colour, a flat two-dimensioned thing which stirred no feeling in
his mind of either repulsion or liking. He had ceased to respond to
life. A landscape was a map to him which his mind grasped, but which
left his interest untouched.

Now he suddenly saw the valley of the Sick Heart as a marvellous thing.
This gash in the earth, full of cold, pure sunlight, was a secret
devised by the Great Artificer and revealed to him and to him only.
There was no place for life in it--there could not be; but neither was
there room for death. This peace was beyond living and dying. He had a
sudden vision of it under a summer sun--green lawns, green forests, a
blue singing stream and cliffs of serrated darkness. A classic
loveliness, Tempe, Phaeacic. But no bird-wing or bird-song, no ripple of
fish, no beast in the thicket--a silence rather of the world as God
first created it, before He permitted the coarse welter of life.

Lew boiled water, gave Leithen his breakfast and helped him to wash and
dress.

'You lie there in the sun,' he said. 'It's good for you. And listen to
what I've got to say. How you feeling?'

'Pretty bad.'

Lew shook his head. 'But I've seen a sicker man get better.'

'I've had the best advice in the world, so I don't delude myself. I
haven't got the shadow of a chance.'

Lew strode up and down before the cave like a sentry.

'You haven't a chance down here, living in a stuffy hole and eating the
sweepings of a store. You want strong air, it don't matter how cold, and
you want fresh-killed meat cooked rare. I've seen that work miracles
with your complaint. But God help you! There's no hope for you here.
You're in your grave already--and so are all of us. The Hare knows. He's
squatting down by the water and starting on the dirges of his tribe.'

Then he took himself off, apparently on some futile foraging errand,
and Leithen, half in the sun, half in the glow of the fire, felt his
weakness changing to an apathy which was almost ease. This was the place
to die in--to slip quietly away with no last convulsive attempt to live.
He had reacted for a moment to life, but only to the after-glow of it.
The thought of further effort frightened him, for there could be no
misery like the struggle against such weakness as his. It looked as if
the Fates, which had given him so much and had also robbed him so
harshly, had relented and would permit a quiet end. Whitman's phrase was
like a sweetmeat on his tongue: 'the delicious near-by assurance of
death.'

Lew and the Indian spent a day of furious activity. They cut huge
quantities of wood and kept both fires blazing. Fire-tending seemed to
give Lew some comfort, as if it spelled life in a dead place. He
wandered round the outer fire like a gigantic pixie; then, as the
evening drew on, he carried Leithen into the cave, and, having arranged
a couch for him, stood over him like an angry schoolmaster.

'D'you believe in God?' he demanded.

'I believe in God.'

'I was brought up that way, too. My father was bedrock Presbyterian, and
I took after him--not like brother Johnny, who was always light-minded.
There was times when my sins fair bowed me down, and I was like old
Christian in _The Pilgrim's Progress_--I'd have gone through fire and
water to get quit of 'em. Then I got the notion of this Sick Heart as
the kind of place where there was no more trouble, a bit of the Garden
of Eden that God had kept private for them as could find it. I'd been
thinking about it for years, and suddenly I saw a chance of getting to
it and finding peace forevermore.--Not dying--I wasn't thinking of
dying--but living happily ever after, as the story-books say. That was
my aim, fool that I was!'

His voice rose to a shout.

'I was mad! It was the temptation of the Devil and not the promise of
God. The Sick Heart is not the Land-of-Beulah, but the Byroad-to-Hell,
same as in Bunyan. It don't rise like a proper river out of little
springs--it comes full-born out of the rock and slinks back into it like
a ghost. I tell you the place is no' canny. You'd say it had the best
grazing in all America, and yet there's nothing can live here. There's a
curse on this valley when I thought there was a blessing. So there's
just the one thing to do if we're to save our souls, and that's to get
out of it, though we break our necks in the job.'

The man's voice had become shrill with passion, and even in the shadow
Leithen could see the fire in his eyes.

'You're maybe thinking different,' he went on. 'You think you're dying
and that this is a nice, quiet place to die in. But you'll be damned for
it. There's a chance of salvation for you if you pass out up on the cold
tops, but there's none if your end comes in this cursed hole.'

Leithen turned wearily on his side to face the speaker.

'You'd better count me out. I'm finished. I'd only be a burden to you. A
couple of days here should see me through, and then you can do what you
like.'

'By God, I won't! I can't leave you--I'd never hold up my head again if
I did. And I can't stay here with Hell waiting to grab me. Me and the
Hare will help you along, for our kit will be light. Besides, you could
show us the road out. The Hare says you know how to get along on steep
snow.'

'Have you any rope?' Leithen asked.

Lew's wild face sobered. 'It's about all I have. I've got two hundred
feet of light rope. Brought it along with the notion it might come in
handy. And I can make some more out of caribou skin.'

Leithen had asked the question involuntarily, for the thing did not
interest him. The deep fatigue which commonly ended his day had dropped
on him like a mountain of lead. Death was very near, and where could he
meet it better than in this gentle place, remote alike from the turmoil
of nature and of man?

But after his meagre supper, as he watched Lew and the Indian repack
their kit, the power of thought returned to him. This was the last lap
of the race; was he to fail in it? Why had he come here when at home he
might have had a cushioned deathbed among friends? Was it not to die
standing, to go out in his boots? And that meant that he must have a
purpose to fill his mind, and let that purpose exclude foolish
meditations on death. Well, he had half-finished his job--he had found
Galliard; but before he could get Galliard back to his old world he must
bring to him the strange man who had obsessed his mind, and who, having
been mad, was now sane. Therefore, he must get Lew out of the Sick Heart
Valley. He did not believe that Lew could find his way out alone. The
long spout of snow was ice in parts, and Lew knew nothing of
step-cutting. Leithen remembered the terror of the Hare in the descent.
Mountaineering to men like Lew was a desperate venture. Could he guide
them up the spout? It would have been child's play in the old days, but
now! . . . He bent his knees and elbows. Great God! his limbs were as
flaccid as indiarubber. What kind of figure would he cut on an
ice-slope?

And yet what was the alternative? To lie here dying by inches--by feet
and yards, perhaps, but still slowly--with Lew in a panic and restrained
from leaving him only by the iron camaraderie of the North. His own
utter weakness made him crave for immobility, but something at the back
of his mind cried out against it. Why had he left England if he was to
cower in a ditch and not stride on to the end? That had always been his
philosophy. He remembered that long ago in his youth he had written bad
verses on the subject, demanding that he meet death 'with the wind in
his teeth and the rain in his face.' It was no false stoicism, but the
creed of a lifetime.

By and by he fell asleep, and--a rare thing for one whose slumbers
seemed drugged--woke in the small hours. Lew could be heard snoring, but
he must have been recently awake, for he had stoked both fires. A queer
impulse seized Leithen to get up. With some difficulty he crawled out of
his sleeping-bag and stumbled to his feet, wrapping a blanket round him
. . .

It was a marvellous night, cold, but not bitterly cold, and the flames
of the outer fire were crimson against a sky of burnished gold.
Moonshine filled the valley and brimmed over the edge of the cliffs.
Those cliffs caught no reflection of light, but were more dark and
jagged than by day; except that on the eastern side, where lay the
snowdrifts, there was a wave of misty saffron.

Moonlight is a soothing thing, softening the raw corners of the world,
but suddenly to Leithen this moonlight seemed monstrous and unearthly.
The valley was a great golden mausoleum with ebony walls, a mausoleum,
not a kindly grave for a common mortal. Kings might die here and lie
here, but not Edward Leithen. There was a tremor in his steady nerves, a
fluttering in his sober brain. He knew now what Lew meant . . . With
difficulty he got back into his sleeping-bag and covered his head so
that he could not see the moon. He must get out of this damned place,
though he used the last pennyweight of his strength.


20

Lew and the Indian had Leithen between them, steadying himself with a
hand on each of their huge back-packs. The Hare's rope had gone to the
cording of the dunnage, and Lew's was in a coil on Leithen's shoulder.
The journey to the snow chute was made in many short stages, across a
frozen pool of the river, and then in the snow-sprinkled herbage below
the eastern crags. The weather was changing, for a yellow film was
creeping from the north over the sky.

'There'll be big snow on the tops,' said Lew, 'and maybe a God-awful
wind.'

It was midday before they reached the foot of the couloir. The lower
slopes, down which Leithen and the Hare had rolled, were set at a gentle
angle, and the firm snow made easy going; it was up in the narrows of
the cleft that it changed to a ribbon of ice. The problem before him
stirred some forgotten chord in Leithen's mind, and he found himself
ready to take command. First he sent Lew and the Hare with the kit up to
the edge of the ice, and bade them anchor the packs there to poles
driven into the last soft snow. That done he made the two men virtually
carry him up the easy slopes. He had a meagre remnant of bodily
strength, and he would need it all for the task before him.

In an hour's time the three were at the foot of the sunless narrows
where the snow was hard ice. There he gave Lew his orders.

'I will cut steps, deep ones with plenty of standing room. Keep looking
before you, and not down. I'll rope, so that if I fall, you can hold me.
If I get to the top I'll try to make the rope fast, and the Hare must
follow in the steps. He will haul up the kit after him; then he will
drop the rope for you, and you must tie it on. If you slip, he will be
able to hold you.'

Leithen chose the Hare to go second, for the Indian seemed less likely
than Lew to suffer from vertigo. He had come up the lower slopes
impassively while Lew had had the face of one in torment.

Lew's hatchet was a poor substitute for an ice-axe. Leithen's old
technique of step-cutting had to be abandoned, and the notches he hacked
would have disgusted a Swiss guide. He had to make them deep and
sloping inward for the sake of Lew's big moccasined feet. Also he had
often to cut hand-holes for himself so that he could rest, plastered
flat against the ice, when his knees shook and his wrists ached and his
head swam with weariness.

It was a mortal slow business, and one long agony. Presently he was past
the throat of the gully and in snow again, soft snow with a hard crust,
but easier to work than the ice of the narrows. Here the wind, which Lew
had foretold, swirled down from the summit, and he almost fell. The last
stage was a black nightmare. Soon it would be all over, he told
himself--soon, soon, there would be the blessed sleep of death.

He reached the top with a dozen feet of rope to spare, and straightway
tumbled into deep snow. There he might have perished, drifting into a
sleep from which there would be no awakening, had not tugs on the rope
from Lew beneath forced him back into consciousness. With infinite
labour he untied the rope from his middle. With frail, fumbling, chilled
hands he made the end fast to a jackpine which grew conveniently near
the brink. He gave the rope the three jerks which was the agreed signal
that he was at the summit and anchored. Then a red mist of giddiness
overtook him, and he dropped limply into the snow at the tree-roots.


21

When Leithen came to his senses, he found it hard to link the present
with the past. His last strong sensation had been that of extreme cold;
now it was as warm as if he were in bed at home, and he found that his
outer garments had been removed and that he was wearing only
underclothes and a jersey. It was night, and he was looking up at a sky
of dark velvet, hung with stars like great coloured lamps. By and by, as
his eyes took in the foreground, he found that he was in a kind of pit
scooped in deep snow with a high rampart of snow around it. The floor
was spread with spruce boughs, but a space had been left in the middle
for a fire, which had for its fuel the butt-ends of two trees which met
in the middle and slipped down as they smouldered.

He did not stay long awake, but in those minutes he was aware of
something new in his condition. The fit of utter apathy had passed. He
was conscious of the strangeness of this cache in the snow, this
midwinter refuge in a world inimical to man. The bitter diamond air,
like some harsh acid, had stung him back to a kind of life--at any rate,
to a feeble response to life.

    *    *    *    *    *

Next day he started out in a state of abject decrepitude. Lew put
snowshoes on him, but he found that he had lost the trick of them, and
kept on tangling up his feet and stumbling. The snow lay deep, and,
under the stricture of the frost, was as dry and powdery as sand, so
that his feet sank into it. Lew went first to break the trail, but all
his efforts did not make a firm track, so that the stages had to be
short, and by the midday meal Leithen was at the end of his tether. The
glow of a fire and some ptarmigan broth slightly revived him, but his
fatigue was such that Lew made camp an hour before nightfall.

That night, in his hole in the snow, Leithen's thoughts took a new
turn. For long his mind had been sluggish, cognisant of walls but of no
windows. Now suddenly it began to move and he saw things . . .

Lew was taking shape in his thoughts as a man and not as a portent. At
first he had been a mystery figure, an inexplicable Providence which
dominated Johnny's mind, and which had loomed big on Leithen's own
horizon. Then he had changed to a disturbing force which had mastered
Galliard and seemed to be an incarnation of the secret madness of the
North. And then in the Sick Heart Valley he had become a Saul whose
crazy fit was passing, a man who was seeking something that he had lost
and had reached his desired goal only to find that it was not there. Lew
and Galliard were in the same boat, sufferers from the same spell.

But Lew had returned by way of panic to normal life. For a moment this
strong child of nature had been pathetic, begging help and drawing
courage from Leithen himself, a dying man. The splendid being had been a
suppliant to one whose body was in decay. The irony of it induced in
Leithen a flicker of affection. He seemed, too, to draw a transitory
vigour from a creature so instinct with life. His numb stoicism was shot
with a momentary warmth and colour. Lew on the trail, shouting oddments
of Scots songs in his rich voice, and verses of the metrical Psalms of
his youth, or engaged in thunderous discourse with the Hare in his own
tongue, seemed to dominate the snowdrifts and the blizzards and the
spells of paralysing cold. Leithen found that he had won a faint warmth
of spirit from the proximity of Lew's gusto. And the man was as gentle
as a woman. His eyes were never off Leithen; he arranged the halts to
suit his feebleness, and at each of them tended him like a mother. At
night he made his bed and fed him with the care of a hospital nurse.

'This ain't the food for you,' he declared. 'You want fresh meat. It's
time we were at Johnny's camp where I can get it for you.'

Half a gale was blowing. He detected the scepticism in Leithen's eye and
laughed.

'It don't look good for hunting weather, says you. Maybe not, but I'll
get what you need. We're not in the Barrens to depend on wandering
caribou. There's beasts in these mountains all the year round, and I
reckon I know where to find 'em. There's caribou, the big woods kind,
and there are more moose than anyone kens, except the Hares. They'll
have stamped out their yards and we've got to look for 'em.'

'What's that?'

'Stamping the snow to get at the shoots. Yards they call 'em down East.
But the Hares call 'em _ravages_. Got the name from the French
missionaries.'

Next day the stages were short and difficult. There was a cruel
northeast wind, and the snow was like kitchen salt and refused to pack.
The Hare broke the trail, but Leithen who followed often sank to his
knees in spite of his snowshoes. ('We need bear-paws like they use down
East,' Lew proclaimed. 'These Northern kind are too narrow to spread the
weight.') An hour's march brought him to utter exhaustion, and there
were moments when he thought that that day would be his last.

At the midday meal he heard what stung his sense of irony into life. Lew
had placed him in the lee of a low-growing spruce which broke the wind,
and had forgotten his presence, for, while he and the Indian collected
wood for the fire, they talked loudly, shouting against the blast. The
Hare chose to speak English, in which he liked to practise himself.

'Him lung-sick,' he said. There could be no doubt about his reference.

'Yeah,' Lew grunted.

'Him soon die, like my brother and my uncles.'

The reply was an angry shout.

'No, by God, he won't! You chew on that, you bloody-minded heathen. He's
going to cheat old man Death and get well.'

Leithen smiled wryly. It was Uncle Toby's oath, but Uncle Toby's efforts
had failed, and so would Lew's.

That night, since the day's journey had been short, his fatigue was a
little less than usual, and after supper, instead of falling at once
into a heavy sleep, he found himself watching Lew, who, wrapped in his
blankets, was smoking his short pipe, and now and then stirring the logs
with the spruce pole which he used as a poker. His eyes were
half-closed, and he seemed to be in a not unpleasant reverie.
Leithen--to his surprise, for he had resolved that his mind was dead to
all mundane interests--found his curiosity roused. This was one of the
most famous guides in the North. The country fitted him as a bearskin
fitted the bear. Never, surely, was man better adapted to his
environment. What had shaken him loose from his normal life and sent
him on a crazy pilgrimage to a legendary river? It could not have been
only a craving to explore, to find out what lay far away over the hills.
There had been an almost mystical exaltation in the quest, for it caused
him to forget all his traditions and desert Galliard, and this
exaltation had ended in a panicky rebound. When he had met him, he had
found a strong man in terror, shrinking from something which he could
not name. It must have been a strange dream which resulted in so cruel
an awakening.

He asked Lew the question point-blank. The man came out of his
absorption and turned his bright eyes on the questioner.

'I've been trying to figure that out myself,' he said. 'All my life
since I was a callant I've been looking for things and never finding
'em.'

He stopped in some embarrassment.

'I don't know that I can rightly explain, for you see I'm not used to
talking. When I was about eighteen I got kinda sick of my life, and
wanted to get away South to the cities. Johnny was never that way, nor
Dad neither. But I reckon there were Frizels far back that had been
restless too. Anyway, I was mighty restless. Then Dad died, and I had to
take on some of his jobs, and before I knew I was deep in the business
of guiding, and feeling good about it. I wanted nothing except to know
more about pelts than any trapper, and more about trailing than any
Indian, and to keep my body as hard as whinstone, and my hearing like a
timber wolf's, and my eyesight like a fish-hawk's.'

'That was before the War?'

Lew nodded. 'Before the War. The War came and Johnny and me went
overseas. We made a bit of a name as snipers, Johnny pretty useful and
me a wee bit better. I enjoyed it right enough, and barring my feet, for
I wasn't used to wearing army boots, I was never sick or sorry. But I
was God-awful homesick, and when I smelt a muskeg again and saw the
pointed sticks, I could have grat with pleasure.'

Lew shook out his pipe.

'But the man that came back wasn't the same as him that crossed the sea.
I was daft about the North, and never wanted to leave it, but I got a
notion that the North was full of things that I didn't know nothing
about--and that it was up to me to find 'em. I took to talking a lot
with Indians and listening to their stories. And then I heard about the
Sick Heart and couldn't find it.'

Lew's embarrassment had returned. His words came slowly, and he kept his
eyes on the hot ashes.

'It happened that I'd a lot of travelling to do by my lone--one trail
took three months when I was looking for some lost gold-diggers. For two
years I hadn't much guiding.'

'You were with Mr. Walter Derwent, weren't you?'

'Yeah. Mr. Derwent's a fine little man and my very good friend. But
mostly I was alone and I was thinking a lot. Dad brought us up well, for
he was mighty religious, and I got to puzzling about my soul. I had
always lived decent, but I reckoned decent living wasn't enough. Out in
the bush you feel a pretty small thing in the hands of God. There was a
book of Dad's I had a fancy for, _The Pilgrim's Progress_, and I got to
thinking of myself as the Pilgrim, and looking for the same kind of
thing to happen to me. I can see now it wasn't sense, but at the time it
seemed to me I was looking at a map of my own road. At the end there was
the River for the Pilgrim to cross, and I got to imagining that the
River was the Sick Heart. I guess I was a bit loony, but I thought I was
the only sensible man, for what did it matter what the other folks were
doing, running about and making money, and marrying and breeding, when
there was this big business of saving your soul?

'Then Mr. Galliard got hold of me. He was likewise a bit loony, but his
daftness and mine was different, for he was looking for something in
this world and, strictly speaking, I was looking for something outside
the world. He didn't know what I wanted, and I didn't worry about him.
But as it fell out, he gave me the chance I'd been looking for, and we
took the trail together. I behaved darned badly, for I wasn't sane, and
by the mercy of God you and Johnny found the man I deserted . . . I
pushed on like a madman and found the Sick Heart, and then, praise God,
my daftness left me . . .

'I don't know what I'd expected. A land flowing with milk and honey, and
angels to pass the time of day! What opened my eyes was when I found
there was no living thing in that valley. That was uncanny, and gave me
the horrors. And then I considered that that great hole in the earth was
a grave, a place to die in, but not to live in, and not a place either
for an honest man to die in. I'm like you, I'm sworn to die on my
feet.'

Lew checked himself with a glance of apology.

'I had to get out,' he said, 'and I had to get you out, for there's no
road to Heaven from the Sick Heart. What did I call it?--a
Byroad-to-Hell!'

'You are cured?' Leithen asked.

'Sure I am. I'm like a man getting better of a fever. I see things in
their proper shape and size now, and not big as mountains and dancing in
the air. I've got to save my soul, but that's to be done by a sane man,
and not by a loony, and is a man's job. I'm the opposite to King David,
for God's goodness to me has been to get me away from yon green pastures
and still waters back among the rocks and the jackpines.'


22

In two days, said Lew, they should make Johnny's camp and Galliard. But
he would not talk about Galliard. He left that problem to the
Omnipotence Who had solved his own.

The man was having a curious effect on Leithen, the same effect on his
spirit that food had on his body, nourishing it and waking it to a faint
semblance of life. The blizzard died away, and there followed days of
sun, when a rosy haze lay on the hills, and the air sparkled with frost
crystals. That night Leithen was aware that another thought had stabbed
his dull mind into wakefulness.

When he left England, he had reasoned himself into a grim resignation.
Life had been very good to him, and, now that it was ending, he made no
complaint. But he could only show his gratitude to life by maintaining
a stout front to death. He was content to be a pawn in the hands of the
Almighty, but he was also a man, and, as Lew put it, must die standing.
So he had assumed a task which interested him not at all, but which
would keep him on his feet. That task he must conscientiously pursue,
but success in it mattered little, provided always he relaxed no effort.

Looking back over the past months, he realised that his interest in it,
which at first had been a question of mere self-coercion, was now a real
thing. He wanted to succeed, partly because of his liking for a
completed job, and partly because the human element had asserted itself.
Galliard was no longer a mathematical symbol, a cipher in a game, but a
human being and Felicity's husband, and Lew was something more, a
benefactor, a friend.

It was the remembrance of Lew that convinced Leithen that a change had
come over his world of thought. He had welcomed the North because it
matched his dull stoicism. Here in this iron and icy world man was a
pigmy, and God was all in all. Like Job he was abashed by the divine
majesty and could put his face in the dust. It was the temper in which
he wished to pass out of life. He asked for nothing--'nut in the husk,
nor dawn in the dusk, nor like beyond death.' He had already had more
than his desserts! And what Omnipotence proposed to do with him was the
business of Omnipotence; he was too sick and weary to dream or hope. He
lay passive in all-potent hands.

Now there suddenly broke in on him like a sunrise a sense of God's
mercy. Deeper than the foreordination of things lay a great
mercifulness . . . Out of the cruel North most of the birds had flown
South from ancient instinct, and would return to keep the wheel of life
moving. Merciful! But some remained, snatching safety by cunning ways
from the winter of death. Merciful! Under the fetters of ice and snow
there were little animals lying snug in holes, and fish under the frozen
streams, and bears asleep in their lie-ups, and moose stamping out their
yards, and caribou rooting for their grey moss. Merciful! And human
beings, men, women, and children, fending off winter and sustaining life
by an instinct old as that of the migrating birds. Lew nursing like a
child one whom he had known less than a week--the Hares stolidly doing
their jobs, as well fitted as Lew for this harsh world--Johnny tormented
by anxiety for his brother, but uncomplainingly sticking to the main
road of his duty . . . Surely, surely, behind the reign of law and the
coercion of power there was a deep purpose of mercy.

The thought induced in Leithen a tenderness to which he had been long a
stranger. He had put life away from him, and it had come back to him in
a final reconciliation. He had always hoped to die in April weather when
the surge of returning life would be a kind of earnest of immortality.
Now, when presently death came to him, it would be like dying in the
spring.


23

That night he spoke of plans. The laborious days had brought his bodily
strength very low, but some dregs of energy had been stirring in his
mind. His breath troubled him sorely, and his voice had failed, so that
Lew had to come close to hear him.

'I cannot live long,' he said.

Lew received the news with a stony, poker face.

'Something must be settled about Galliard,' he went on. 'You know I came
here to find him. I know his wife and his friends, and I wanted a job to
carry me on to the end . . . We must get him back to his own people.'

'And who might they be?' Lew asked.

'His wife . . . His business associates. He has made a big place for
himself in New York.'

'He didn't talk like that. I never heard him mention 'em. He hasn't been
thinking much of anything except his old-time French forbears,
especially them as went North.'

'You went to Clairefontaine with him?'

'Yeah. I wasn't supposed to tell, but you've been there and you've
guessed it. It was like coming home for him, and yet not coming home. We
went to a nice place up the stream and he sat down and grat. Looked like
it had once been his home, but that his home had shifted and he'd still
to find it. After that he was in a kind of fever--all the way to the
Arctic and then on here. He found that his brother and his uncle had
died up there by the Ghost River.'

'I know. I saw the graves.'

Lew's eyes opened. 'You and Johnny went there? You stuck mighty close to
our trail . . . Well, up to then Galliard had been the daft one. I could
get no sense out of him, and most of the time he'd sit dreaming like an
old squaw by the fire. After Fort Bannerman it was my turn. I don't
rightly remember anything he said after that, for I wasn't worrying
about him, only about myself and that damned Sick Heart . . . What was
he like when you found him?'

'He was an ill man, but his body was mending. His mind--well, he'd been
lost for three days and had the horrors on him. But I won't say he was
cured. You can have the terror of the North on you and still be under
its spell.'

'That's so. It's the worst kind.'

'He kept crying out for you. It looks as though you were the only one
that could release him. Your madness mastered his, and now that you are
sane again he might catch the infection of your sanity.'

Lew pondered. 'It might be,' he said shortly.

'Well, I'm going out, and it's for you to finish the job. You must get
him down-country and back to his friends. I've written out the details
and left them with Johnny. You must promise, so that I can die with an
easy mind.'

For a little Lew did not speak.

'You're not going to die,' he said fiercely.

'The best authorities in the world have told me that I haven't the ghost
of a chance.'

'They're wrong, and, by God, we'll prove them wrong!' The blue eyes had
a frosty sternness.

'Promise me, anyhow. Promise that you'll see Galliard back among his
friends. You could get him out, even in winter?'

'Yeah. We can get a dog team from the Hares' camp if he isn't fit for
the trail. And once at Fort Bannerman we can send word to Edmonton for a
plane . . . If it's to do you any good I promise to plant the feller
back where he belongs. But you've got to take 'count of one thing. He
must be cured right here in the bush. If he isn't cured before he goes
out, he'll never be cured. It's only the North can mend what the North
breaks.'


24

Next day Leithen collapsed utterly, for the strength went from his legs,
and his difficult breathing became almost suffocation. The business of
filling the lungs with air, to a healthy man an unconscious function,
had become for him a desperate enterprise where every moment brought the
terror of failure. He felt every part of his decrepit frame involved,
not lungs and larynx only, but every muscle and nerve from his brain to
his feet, the combined effort of all that was left of him to feed the
dying fires of life. A rough sledge was made and Lew and the Hare
dragged him laboriously through the drifts. Fortunately they had reached
the windswept ridges where the going was easier. Twenty-four hours later
there was delivered at Johnny's camp a man who looked to be in the very
article of death.




Part Three

I HAD A SINGULAR FEELING AT BEING IN HIS COMPANY. FOR I COULD HARDLY
BELIEVE THAT I WAS PRESENT AT THE DEATH OF A FRIEND, AND THEREFORE I DID
NOT PITY HIM.

                                                       PLATO, PHAEDO, 58


In the middle of January there was a pause in the subzero weather, and a
mild wind from the west made the snow pack like cheese and cleared the
spruce boughs of their burden. In front of the hut some square yards of
flat ground had been paved by Johnny with stones from the brook, and,
since the melting snow drained fast from it, it was dry enough for
Leithen to sit there. There was now a short spell of sun at midday, and
though it had no warmth it had light, and that light gave him an access
of comfort.

He reminded himself for the thousandth time that a miracle had happened,
and that he was not in pain. His breath was short, but not difficult. He
was still frail, but the utter overwhelming weakness had gone.

As yet he scarcely dared even to hint to himself that he might get
well. His reason had been convinced that that was impossible. There had
been no doubts in the minds of Acton Croke and young Ravelston . . . Yet
Croke had refused to be too dogmatic. He had said--'in the present
position of our knowledge.' He had admitted that medical science was
only beginning to understand the type of tuberculosis induced by
gas-poisoning. Technicalities had begun to recur to Leithen's memory:
Croke's talk of 'chronic fibrous infection' and 'broncho-pulmonary
lesions.' Sinister-sounding phrases, but he remembered, too, reading or
hearing somewhere that fibrous areas in the lungs could be walled off
and rendered inert. That meant some sort of cure; at any rate, a
postponement of death.

Lew and the Hares had no doubt about it. 'You're getting well,' the
former repeated several times a day. 'Soon you'll be the huskiest of the
lot of us.' And the Indians had ceased to look at him furtively like
something stricken. They ignored him, which was a good sign, for they
knew better than most the signs of the disease which had decimated their
people.

Lew's nursing had been drastic and tireless. Leithen's recollections of
his arrival in camp from the Sick Heart River were vague, for he had
been in a stupor of weakness. He remembered his first realisation that
he was under a roof: the smoke from the fire which nearly choked him;
alternate overdoses of heat and cold; food which he could not swallow;
horrid hours of nausea. And then his memories were less of pain and
weakness than of grim discomfort. Lew's tyrannical hand had been laid on
him every hour. He was made to eat food when he was retching, or at any
rate to absorb the juices of it. His tongue was like a stick, and he
longed for cold water, but he was never allowed it. He was wrapped in
blankets like a mummy, and kept in the open air when frost gummed his
lips like glue and every breath was like swallowing ice, and the air
smote on his exposed face like a buffet.

He bore it dumbly, wretched but submissive. He might have been in a
clinic, for he had surrendered his soul--not to a parcel of doctors and
nurses, but to one fierce back-woodsman. Lew was life incarnate, and the
living triumphed over what was half-dead. The conscious effort involved
in every hour of his past journey was at an end. He was not called on
for decisions; these were made for him, and his mind sank into a
stagnation which was almost painless.

Then strange things began to happen. He was stirred out of his apathy by
little stabs of feeling which were remotely akin to pleasure. The
half-raw meat seemed to acquire a flavour; he discovered the ghost of an
appetite; he actually welcomed his morning cup of tea. He turned on his
side to sleep without dismal forebodings about his condition when he
woke . . . His beard worried him, for in his old expeditions he had
always shaved regularly, and one morning, to his immense surprise, he
demanded his razor, and with Lew's approval shaved himself clean. He
made a messy business of it, and took a long time over it, but the
achievement pleased him. Surely the face that he looked at in the mirror
was less cadaverous, the eyes less leaden, the lips less pallid, the
texture of the skin more wholesome!

There was one memorable morning when, the intense cold having slackened,
Lew stripped him to the buff, and he lay on a pile of skins before the
fire while one of the Hares massaged his legs and arms. After that he
took tottering walks about the hut, and one midday ventured out to the
little platform. Presently Lew made him take daily exercise and in all
weathers.

He was becoming conscious, too, of his surroundings. First came the hut.
Assuredly Johnny was no slouch at hut-making. The earthen floor had been
beaten flat and smooth by the Hares, whose quarters were a little annex
at one end. The building was some sixty feet square, but the floor space
within was oblong, since four bunks had been built into one side. The
walls were untrimmed spruce logs, and the roof was the same, but
interwoven and overlaid with green boughs. Every chink in both walls and
roof was filled with moss or mud. Johnny had constructed a fireplace of
stones, with a bottle-shaped flue made of willow saplings puddled with
clay. The fire was the special charge of the smaller Hare, and was kept
going night and day to supplement the stove.

Warmth was a simple matter, but, though Leithen did not know it, food
soon became a problem. Lew and Galliard had had scanty supplies, for
they had set out on their journey with fevered brains. Johnny and the
Hares had back-packed a fair amount, but the bulk of what they had
brought from Fort Bannerman was cached at the Hares' camp or at Lone
Tree Lake. It had been Johnny's intention to send the Hares back to
bring up the reserves with a dog team, and in the meantime to supplement
the commissariat by hunting. He was a good shot, Lew was a famous shot,
and the Indians were skilled trappers. That was well enough for the
first weeks after Lew and Leithen joined them. There were ptarmigan and
willow grouse to be got in the bush, and the woodland caribou, still
plump from his autumn guzzling; whence came beef tea and underdone
steaks for Leithen, and full meals of flesh for all.

But in the tail-end of December for ten days a blizzard had blown. It
came out of the northeast and found some alleyway into the mountains,
for these gave no protection, so that it raged as fiercely as in the
open Barrens. The cold was not great, and it was therefore possible to
keep the fire low and prevent the black-smoke from choking the hut. But
there was little fresh air for Leithen, though in the gaps of the storm
Lew carried him out-of-doors and brought him back plastered like a snow
man. There were three days when a heavy weight of snow fell, but for the
rest it was rather a carnival of the winds, which blew sometimes out of
a clear sky, swirling the fallen snow in a _tourmente_, and sometimes
filled every aisle of the woods with thick, twisting vapours.

Hunting was all but impossible; whether in the driving snow or in the
Scots mist type of weather the visibility was nil. Leithen was aware
that the men were out, for often he was left alone, and in the few
daylight hours there was never more than one at home, but his mind was
still dull and he had no curiosity about what they were doing. It was
as well, for he did not notice the glum faces and the anxious eyes of
the others. But he did notice the change in his food.

He had come to like the fresh, bitter flavour of the half-raw caribou
meat. That was his staple fare, that and his carefully measured daily
dose of tomato juice; he rarely tasted Johnny's flapjacks. Now there was
little fresh meat, and instead he was given pemmican, which he swallowed
with difficulty, or the contents of one of the few remaining tins.

Johnny was getting very grave about supplies. As soon as the weather
cleared, an attempt must be made to get up the reserves from the Hares'
camp. They were out of sugar, almost out of tea and coffee, and their
skins would give trouble unless they had fruit juice. But above all the
hunting must be resumed. That was their main source of supply; since
Christmas the caribou had been harder to get, and February might bring
savage weather. Of these anxieties Leithen knew nothing. He was
overwhelmed with the miracle of vigour creeping back into his moribund
body. On the road from the Sick Heart River he had found himself
responding again to life, and had welcomed the change as the proper mood
in which to die. But this was different--it was not the recognition of
life, but life itself, which had returned to him.

At night in the pit in the snow with Lew and the Hare he had become
suddenly conscious of the mercifulness of things. There was a purpose of
pity and tenderness in the iron compulsion of fate. Now this thought was
always with him--the mercy as well as the omnipotence of God. His
memory could range over the past and dwell lovingly and thankfully on
its modest pleasures. A little while ago such memories, if he could have
revived them, would have been a torment.

    *    *    *    *    *

His mind ran up and down the panorama of his life, selecting
capriciously. Oddly enough, it settled on none of the high lights. There
had been moments of drama in his career--an adventure in the Aegean
island of Plakos, for example, and more than one episode in the War. And
there had been hours of special satisfaction--when he won the mile at
school and college, his first big success at the Bar, his maiden speech
in the House, his capture of the salmon when he and Lamancha and
Palliser-Yeates poached in the Highlands. But though his memory passed
these things in review, it did not dwell on them. Three scenes seemed to
attract it especially, and he found that he could spend hours
contentedly in reconstructing them and tasting their flavour.

The first belonged to his childhood. One morning in spring he had left
his Border home determined to find what lay beyond the head of a certain
glen. He had his rod with him, for he was an ardent fisherman, and
luncheon in his pocket--two jam sandwiches, a dainty known as a currant
scone, two bread-and-butter sandwiches, a hard-boiled egg, and an apple;
lovingly he remembered every detail. His short legs had crossed the head
of the glen beyond the well-eye of the burn, and had climbed to the
tableland of peat haggs and gravel, which was the watershed. Here he
encountered an April hailstorm, and had to take shelter in a hagg, where
he ate his luncheon with intense relish. The hail passed, and a mild
blue afternoon succeeded, with the Cheviots clear on the southern
skyline.

He had struggled across the peat bog, into the head of the glen beyond
the watershed, where another burn fell in delectable pools among rowans
and birches, and in these pools he had caught trout whose bellies were
more golden and whose spots were brighter than the familiar fish in his
own stream. Late in the evening he had made for home, and had crossed
the hills in an April sunset of rose and saffron. He remembered the
exultation in his small heart, the sense of being an explorer and an
adventurer, which competed with a passionate desire for food.

Everything that day had gone exactly right. No one had upbraided him for
being late. The trout had been justly admired. He had sat down to a
comfortable supper, and had fallen asleep and rolled off his chair in
the middle of it. Assuredly a day to be marked with a white stone. He
could recall the sounds that accompanied it--the tinkle of the burn in
its tiny pools, the perpetual wail of curlews, the sudden cackle of a
nesting grouse. And the scents, too--peat, wood-smoke, crushed mountain
fern, miles of dry bent, the pure, clean odour of icy water.

This memory came chiefly in the mornings. In the afternoons, when he was
not asleep, he was back at Oxford. The scene was always the same--supper
in the college hall, a few lights burning, the twilight ebbing in the
lancet windows, the old portraits dim as a tapestry. There was no
dinner in hall in the summer term, only supper, when you could order
what you pleased. The memory of the fare almost made him hungry--fried
eggs, cold lamb and mint sauce, and salad, stewed gooseberries and
cream, cheese and wheaten bread, and great mugs of home-brewed beer . .
. He had been in the open air most of the day, riding over Shotover or
the Cumnor hills, or canoeing on the upper Thames in the grassy meadows
above Godstow, or adventuring on a bicycle to fish the dry fly in the
Cotswold streams. His body had been bathed in the sun and wind and fully
exercised, so his appetite was immense. But it was not the mere physical
comfort which made him dwell on the picture. It was the mood which he
remembered, and could almost recapture, the mood which saw the world as
a place of long, sunlit avenues leading to marvellous horizons. That was
his twentieth year, he told himself, which mankind is always longing to
find again.

The third memory was the most freakish. It belonged to his early days at
the Bar, when he lived in small ugly rooms in one of the Temple courts,
and had very little money to spend. It was the first day of the Easter
vacation, and he was going to Devonshire with Palliser-Yeates to fish
the Exmoor hill streams. The cheapest way was to drive with his luggage
direct to Paddington, after the meagre breakfast which his laundress
provided. But it seemed an occasion to celebrate, so he had broken his
journey at his club in Saint James's Street, a cheerful,
undistinguished, young man's establishment, and had breakfasted there
with his friend. It had been a fresh April morning; gulls had been
clamorous as he drove along the Embankment, and a west wind had been
stirring the dust in Pall Mall . . . He remembered the breakfast in the
shabby old coffee-room, and Palliser-Yeates's fly-book which he spilt
all over the table. Above all he remembered his own boyish
anticipations. In twenty-four hours he would be in a farmhouse which
smelt of paraffin and beeswax and good cooking, looking out on a green
valley with a shallow brown stream tumbling in riffles and drowsing in
pools under banks of yellow bent. The larch plantations would be a pale
mist on the hillsides, the hazel coverts would be budding, plovers would
be everywhere, and water-ouzels would be flashing their white breasts
among the stones . . . The picture was so dear and homelike that he
found himself continually returning to it. It was like a fire at which
he could warm his hands.

    *    *    *    *    *

But there came a time when this pleasant picture-making ceased, and his
mind turned back on itself. He had lost the hard stoical mood in which
he had left London, but he was not clear as to what had replaced it.
What was he doing here in a hut inside the Arctic Circle, among
mountains which had never been explored and scarcely visited, in the
company of Indians and half-breeds? . . . And then he slowly became
conscious of Galliard.

All these weeks he had not noticed Galliard's presence or enquired what
had happened to him. This man, the original purpose of his journey, had
simply dropped out of his line of vision. He pondered on the queer
tricks which the mind can play. The Frizels and the Indians were the
human background to his life, but it was a background undifferentiated,
for he never troubled to distinguish between the two Hares, and Lew, who
was his daily ministrant, seemed to have absorbed the personality of
Johnny. Galliard had sunk also into this background. One evening, when
he saw what appeared to be three Frizels in the hut, he thought his mind
wandering.

Moreover, the broken man, bedridden, half-crazy, whom he had left behind
when he set out for the Sick Heart River, had disappeared. What he saw
now was a big fellow, dressed in the same winter kit as Lew and Johnny,
and busy apparently on the same jobs. He cut down young spruces and
poplars for fuel, he looked after the big fire which burned outside and
was used chiefly for melting snow and ice into water, and sometimes he
hunted and brought back game. Slowly this figure disentangled itself
from its background and was recognised. It had followed Leithen's
example and shaved its beard, and the face was very much like that of
the picture in the Park Avenue apartment.

Leithen's vitality had sunk so low that he had spoken little during his
early recovery, and afterwards had been too much engaged with his own
thoughts. This detachment had prevented his listening to the talk in the
hut. His attention was only engaged when he was directly addressed, and
that was done chiefly by Lew. But now, while he did not attempt to
overhear, he was conscious of the drone of conversation after supper in
the evening, and began to distinguish the different notes in it. There
was no mistaking Lew's beautiful rich tones, with their subtle Scots
cadences, and Johnny's harsher and more drawling voice. Then he became
aware of a third note, soft like Lew's, but more nasal, and one
afternoon, at the tail-end of a blizzard, when Leithen lay abed in the
firelight and the others were getting kindlings from the wind-felled
trees, this voice addressed him.

'Can we talk now?' it said. 'I've been waiting for this chance now that
you're mending. I think we have much to say to each other.'

Leithen was startled. This was what he had not heard for months, an
educated voice, a voice from his own world. A stone had been thrown into
the pool of his memory and the ripples stretched to the farther shore.
This was Galliard; he remembered everything about Galliard, reaching
back to Blenkiron's first mention of him in his Down Street rooms.

'Tell me who you are,' the voice continued.

Leithen did not answer. He was wondering how to begin an explanation of
a purpose which must seem wholly fantastic. He, a shell of a creature,
had set out to rescue this smiling frontiersman who seemed to fit
perfectly into his environment.

'Johnny says that you know some of my friends. Do you mind telling me
your name? I don't trust Johnny's ear, but I think he said "Leven."'

'Not quite. Leithen.'

Galliard repeated the word, boggling, like all his countrymen at the
'th.' 'Scotch, aren't you?'

'Yes, but I live in England.'

'You've been a pretty sick man, I gather, but you're mending fast. I
wonder what brought a sick man to this outlandish place in midwinter?
These mountains are not exactly a sanatorium . . . You don't mind my
asking questions? You see, we come out of the same world, and we're
alone here--the only people of our kind for a thousand miles.'

'I want you to ask questions. It's the easiest way for me to tell you my
story . . . I crossed the Atlantic last summer thinking that I was a
dying man. The best English authority said so, and the best American
authority confirmed his view. I'm unmarried, and I didn't want to die in
a nursing home. I've always been an active man, and I proposed to keep
going until I dropped. So I came out here.'

Galliard nodded. His brown eyes had a smiling, comprehending
friendliness.

'That I understand--and admire. But why to America?--Why just here?--And
on a trip like this?'

'I had to have a job. I must be working under orders, for it was the
only way to keep going. And this was the job that offered itself.'

'Yes, but please tell me. How did it happen that a sick Englishman was
ordered to the Arctic Circle? What kind of job?'

Leithen smiled. 'You will think it fantastic. The idea came from a
kinsman of yours--a kinsman by marriage. His name in Blenkiron.'

Galliard's face passed from an amused inquisitiveness to an extreme
gravity.

'Our Uncle John! Tell me, what job did he give you?'

'To find out where you had gone, and join you, and, if possible, bring
you back. No, not _bring_ you--for I expected to be dead before
that--but to persuade you.'

'You were in New York? You saw our Uncle John there?'

'No. In London. I know his other niece, Lady Clanroyden--Clanroyden was
at school and college with me--and I had some business once with
Blenkiron. He came to my rooms one morning last summer, and told me
about you.'

Galliard's eyes were on the ground. He seemed to have been overcome by a
sudden shyness, and for a moment he said nothing. Then he asked:

'You took on the job because you liked Blenkiron? Or perhaps Lady
Clanroyden?'

'No. I happen to like Lady Clanroyden very much--and old Blenkiron, too.
But my motive was purely selfish. I wasn't interested in you; I didn't
want to do a kindness to anybody; I wanted something that would keep me
on my feet until I died. It wouldn't have mattered if I had never heard
the name of any of the people concerned. I was thinking only of myself,
and the job suited me.'

'You saved my life. If you and Johnny hadn't followed our trail. I
should long ago have been a heap of bones under the snow.' Galliard
spoke very softly, as if he were talking to himself.

'Perhaps,' Leithen said. 'But that was an accident, and there's no
gratitude due, any more than to the policeman who calls an ambulance in
a street accident.'

Galliard raised his head.

'You were in New York? Whom did you meet there? My wife?'

'Yes. The Ravelstons, of course. And some of your friends like Bronson
Jane, and Derwent, and Savory. But principally your wife.'

'Can you'--the man stuttered--'can you tell me about her?'

'She is a brave woman, but I need not tell you that. Anxious and
miserable, of course, but one would never guess it. She keeps a stiff
face to the world. The story is that you have had a breakdown and are
resting somewhere. She won't have any fuss made, for she thinks it might
annoy you when you come back.'

'Come back! She believes I will come back?'

'Implicitly. She thinks you had reached crossroads in your mind and had
to go away and think it out and decide which one to take. When you have
decided, she thinks you will come back.'

'Then why did she want you to go to look for me?'

'Because there was always a chance you might be dead--or sick. I sent
her a message from Fort Bannerman saying that I had ascertained you were
alive and well up to a week before.'

'How did you find me?'

'I guessed that you had gone first to Clairefontaine. I got no news of
you there, but some little things convinced me that you had been there.
Then I guessed you had gone North where your brother and your uncle had
gone. So I followed. I saw their graves, and then Johnny told me about
Lew's craze for the Sick Heart River, and I guessed again that he had
taken you there. It was simply a series of lucky guesses. If you like,
you can call them deductions from scanty evidence. I was lucky, but that
was because I had made a guess at what was passing in your mind, and I
think I guessed correctly.'

'You didn't know me--never met me. What data had you?'

'Little things picked up in New York and at Clairefontaine. You see I am
accustomed to weighing evidence.'

'And what did you make of my psychology?'

'I thought you were a man who had got into a wrong groove and wanted to
get out before it was too late . . . No, that isn't the right way to put
it. If it had been that way there was no hope of getting you back. I
thought you were a man who thought he had sold his birthright and was
tortured by his conscience and wanted to buy it back.'

'You think that a more hopeful state of affairs?'

'Yes. For it is possible to keep your birthright and live in a new
world. Many men have done it.'

Galliard got up and pulled on his parka and mitts. 'I'm going out,' he
said, 'for I want to think. You're a wizard, Mr. Leithen. You've
discovered what was wrong with me; but you're not quite right about the
cure I was aiming at . . . I was like Lew, looking for a Sick Heart
River . . . I was seeking the waters of atonement.'

For a moment Leithen was alarmed. Galliard had seemed the sanest of men,
all the saner because he had divested himself of his urban trappings and
had yet kept the accent of civilisation. But his last words seemed an
echo of Lew--Lew before his cure. But a glance at the steady eyes and
grave face reassured him.

'I mean what I say,' Galliard continued. 'I had been faithless to a
trust and had to do penance for it. I had forgotten God and had to find
Him . . . We have each of us to travel to his own Sick Heart River.'


2

In the days of short commons Lew was a tower of strength. He ran the
camp in an orderly bustle, the Indians jumped to his orders, and Johnny
worked with him like an extra right hand. His friendly gusto kept up
everyone's spirits, and Leithen was never aware of the scarcity of
rations.

It was a moment when he seemed to have reached the turning-point of his
disease. Most of his worst discomforts had gone, and only weakness vexed
him and an occasional scantiness of breath. The night sweats had ceased,
and the nausea, and he could eat his food with a certain relish. Above
all, power was creeping back into his limbs. He could put on his clothes
without having to stop and pant, and something of his old striding
vigour was returning to his legs. He felt himself fit for longer walks
than the weather and the narrow camp platform permitted.

Lew watched him with an approving eye. As he passed, he would stop and
pat him on his shoulder.

'You're doing fine,' he would say. 'Soon you'll be fit to go hunting.
You much of a shot?'

'Fair.'

Lew laughed. 'If an Old Countryman 'lows he's a fair shot, it means he's
darned good.'

One evening just before supper, when the others were splitting firewood,
Lew sat himself down before Leithen and tapped him on the knee.

'Mr. Galliard'--he said--'I'd like to say something about Mr. Galliard.
You know I acted mighty bad to him, but then I was out of my senses, and
he wasn't too firm in his. Well, I'm all right now, but I'm not so sure
that he is. His health's fine, and he can stand a long day in the bush.
But he ain't happy--no happier than when he first hired me way back last
spring. I mean he's got his wits back, and he's as sensible as you and
me, but there's a lot worrying him.'

Lew spoke as if he found it difficult to say what he wanted.

'I feel kind o' responsible for Mr. Galliard,' he said, 'seeing that
he's my master and is paying me pretty high. And you must feel kind o'
responsible for him or you wouldn't have come five thousand miles
looking for him . . . I see you've started talking to him. I'd feel
easier in my mind if you had a good long pow-wow and got out of him
what's biting him. You don't happen to know?'

Leithen shook his head. 'Only that he wasn't happy and thought he might
feel better if he went down North. But the plan doesn't seem to have
come off.'

The conversation, as it fell out, was delayed until early in February,
when, in a spell of fine weather, Johnny and the smaller Indian had set
off to the Hares' camp to bring back supplies by dog team. It was about
three o'clock in the afternoon, and the sun was beginning to go down in
a sea of gold and crimson. Leithen sat at the hut door, facing the big
fire on the platform which Galliard had been stoking. The latter pulled
out a batch of skins and squatted on them opposite him.

'Can we talk?' he said. 'I've kept away from you, for I've been trying
to think out what to say. Maybe you could help me. I'd like to tell you
just how I was feeling a year ago.'

Then words seemed to fail him. He was overcome with extreme shyness, his
face flushed, and he averted his eyes.

'I have no business to trouble you with my affairs,' he stammered. 'I
apologise . . . I am a bore.'

'Get on, man,' said Leithen. 'I have crossed half the world to hear
about your affairs. They interest me more than anything on earth.'

But Galliard's tongue still halted, and he seemed to find it impossible
to start.

'Very well,' said Leithen--I will begin by telling you what I know about
you. You come from the Clairefontaine Valley in Quebec, which
Glaubsteins have now made hideous with a dam and a pulp mill. I believe
your own firm had a share in that sacrilege. You belong to an ancient
family, now impoverished, and your father farmed a little corner of the
old seigneurie . . . When you were nineteen or so you got sick of your
narrow prospects and went down to the States to try your luck. After a
roughish time you found your feet, and are now a partner in Ravelstons,
and one of the chief figures in American finance . . . Meantime your
father died, soon after you left him. Your brother Paul carried on the
farm, and then he also got restless, and a year or two ago went off to
the North, pretending he was going to look for your uncle Aristide, who
had disappeared there years before. Paul got to the river which Aristide
discovered, and died there--the graves of both are there, and you saw
them last summer . . . At the other end something happened to _you_. You
started out for Clairefontaine with Lew, and then you were at Ghost
River, and then came on here. Is that sketch correct?'

Galliard nodded. His eyes were abstracted, as if he were in the throes
of a new idea.

'Well, you must fill out the sketch. But let me tell you two other
things. I went to Clairefontaine after you, and after you to the Ghost
River, and I saw the crosses in the graveyard. Also, long ago when I was
a young man I went hunting in Quebec, and I came out by way of
Clairefontaine. I found the little meadow at the head of the stream, and
I have never forgotten it. When I knew I had to die, my first thought
was to go there, for it seemed the place to find peace.'

Galliard's face woke to a sudden animation.

'By God! that's a queer thing. I went to that meadow--the first thing I
did after I left New York. There's a fate in this! . . . I think now I
can get on with my story . . .'

It was a tale which took long in the telling, and it filled several of
the short winter twilights. There were times when the narrative lagged,
and times when it came fast and confusedly. Galliard had curious tricks
of speech; sometimes elaborate, the product of wide reading, and
sometimes halting, amateurish, almost childlike, as if he were dragging
his thoughts from a deep well.

From the village school of Chteau-Gaillard, he said, he had gone to the
University of Laval. He was intended for the law, and his first courses
were in classics and philosophy. He enjoyed them, and for a little even
toyed with the notion of giving his life to those studies and looking
for a university post. What switched his thoughts to another line was a
slow revolt against the poverty-stricken life at Clairefontaine. He saw
his father and brother bowed down with toil, for no purpose except to
win a bare living. In the city he had occasional glimpses of comfort and
luxury, and of a wide, coloured world, and these put him wholly out of
temper with his home. He did a good deal of solid thinking. If he
succeeded as a lawyer, he would exchange the narrow world of a country
farm for the narrow world of a provincial city--more ease, certainly,
but something far short of his dreams. He must make money, and money
could only be made in big business. In Canada his own French people did
little in business, having always left that to the English, and in
Canada he might have to fight against prejudice. So he determined to go
to the country where he believed there was no prejudice, where business
was exalted above all callings, and where the only thing required of a
man was to be good at his job.

He left Laval and went to a technical college where he acquired the
rudiments of accounting and a smattering of engineering science. The
trouble came when his father discovered the change. The elder Gaillard
had something of the seigneur left in him. There was a duty owed to
gentle birth. A gentleman might be a farmer who laboured from dawn to
dusk in the fields; he could be a priest; he could be a lawyer; but if
he touched trade he forfeited his gentility. Moreover, the father hated
the very word America. So when the son frankly announced his intention
there was a violent family quarrel. Next day he left for Boston and he
never saw his father again.

Galliard scarcely mentioned his early struggles. They had to be taken
for granted like infantile ailments. He took up the tale when he had
come to New York and had met Felicity Dasent.

To Leithen's surprise he spoke of Felicity without emotion. He seemed to
be keeping his mind fixed on the need to make his story perfectly
clear--an intellectual purpose which must exclude sentiment.

He had fallen deeply in love with her after a few meetings. To him she
represented a new world very different from the tough world of buying
and selling in which he had found his feet. It was a world which
satisfied all the dreams of his boyhood and youth, a happy, gracious
place with, as its centre, the most miraculous of beings. It was still
more different from Clairefontaine, with its poverty and monotony and
back-breaking toil. Felicity seemed far farther removed from
Clairefontaine than from the grubbiest side of Wall Street. The old
petty world of Mass and market was infinitely remote from her gracious
and civilised life. It was a profanation to think of the two together.
Only the meadow at the head of the stream seemed to harmonise with his
thoughts about her.

Then came their marriage, and Galliard's entry into society, and his
conspicuous social success. After that the trouble began in his soul . .
.

He was not very clear about its beginnings. He found things in which he
had had an acute interest suddenly go stale for him. He found himself in
revolt against what he had once joyfully accepted, and when he probed
for the reason he discovered to his surprise that it was because it
clashed with some memory which he thought he had buried. At first he
believed that it was only regret for his departing youth. Boyish
recollections came back to him gilded by time and distance. But
presently he realised that the trouble was not nostalgia for his dead
boyhood, but regret for a world which was still living and which he had
forsaken. Not exactly regret, either; rather remorse, a sense that he
had behaved badly, had been guilty in some sense of a betrayal.

He fought against the feeling. It was childish, with no basis of reason.
He was a rich man, and, if he liked, could have a country house in
Quebec, which would offer all the enchantments of his youth without its
poverty . . . But he realised miserably that this was no solution. It
was not Quebec that he wanted, but a different world of thought, which
was hopelessly antagonistic to that in which he now dwelt. To his
consternation he discovered that distaste for his environment was
growing fast. What had been the pleasures of his life became its
boredoms; high matters of business were only a fuss about trifles; men
whom he had once reverenced seemed now trivial and wearisome. A lost
world kept crowding in on him; he could not recover it, but he felt that
without it there was no peace for him in life. There was only one stable
thing, Felicity, who moved in a happy sphere of her own, from which he
daily felt more estranged.

Ridiculous little things tormented him--a tune which reminded him of a
French _chanson_, the smell of a particular tobacco which suggested the
coarse stuff grown at Clairefontaine. He dared not go shooting or
fishing because of their associations; golf, which belonged wholly to
his new world, he came to loathe.

'It was like a cancer,' he said. 'A doctor once told me that cancer was
a growth of certain cells at a wild pace--the pace at which a child
grows in the womb--a sort of crazy resurgence of youth. It begins by
being quite innocent, but soon it starts pressing in on other cells and
checking their growth, and the thing becomes pathological. That was what
happened to me. The old world came to bulk so big in my life that it
choked the rest of me like a cancer in the mind.'

He had another trouble, the worst of all. He had been brought up a
strict Catholic, but after he left home he had let his religion fall
from him. He had never been to Mass. Felicity was an Episcopalian who
took her creed lightly, and they had been married in a fashionable New
York church. Now all the fears and repressions of his youth came back to
him. He had forgotten something of desperate importance, his eternal
welfare. He had never thought much about religion, but had simply taken
it for granted till he began to neglect it, so he had no sceptical
apparatus to support him. His conduct had not been the result of
enlightenment, but flat treason.

'I came to realise that I had forgotten God,' he said simply.

The breaking-point came because of his love for Felicity. The farther he
moved away from her and her world, the dearer she became. The one thing
he was resolved should not happen was a slow decline in their affection.
Either he would recover what he had lost and harmonise it with what he
had gained, or a clean cut would be made, with no raw edges to fester .
. . So on a spring morning, with a breaking heart, he walked out of
Felicity's life . . .

'You have guessed most of this?' he asked.

'Most of it,' said Leithen. 'What I want to know is the sequel. You have
been nearly a year looking for your youth. What luck?'

'None. But you don't put it quite right, for I was willing enough to
grow old decently. What I had to recover was the proper touch with the
world which I had grown out of and could no more reject than my own
skin. Also I had to make restitution. I had betrayed something ancient
and noble, and had to do penance for my sins.'

'Well?' Leithen had to repeat the question, for words seemed to have
failed Galliard.

'I did both,' he said slowly. 'To that extent I succeeded. I got into
touch with my people's life, and I think I have done penance. But I
found that more was needed. I belong to the North, and to go on living I
had to master the North . . . But it mastered me.'

Leithen waited for Galliard to expound this saying, but he waited a long
time. The other's face had darkened, and he seemed to be wrestling with
difficult thoughts. At last he asked a question.

'I cannot explain,' said Galliard, 'for I don't quite know what happened
. . . I thought, if I found my brother, or at least found out what had
become of him, that I should have done the right thing--done the kind of
thing my family have always been doing--defied the North, scored off it.
It didn't work out like that. Up there on the Ghost River I was like a
haunted man--something kept crushing me down. Yes, by God! I was afraid.
Naked fear!--I had never known it before . . . I had to go on or give up
altogether. Then Lew started in about his Sick Heart River. He was
pretty haywire, but I thought he was on the track of something
wonderful. He said it was a kind of Paradise where a man left his sins
behind him. It wasn't sense, if I'd stopped to think, but I was beyond
thinking. Here was a place where one could be reconciled to the
North--where the North ceased to be a master and became a comforter. I
can tell you I got as mad about the thing as Lew.'

'But Lew was no good to me,' he went on. 'He forgot all about me. Being
mad, he was thinking only of himself. I hurt my foot and had a difficult
time keeping up with him. Pretty bad days they were--I don't want to go
through anything of the sort again. Then I lost him and should have
perished if you hadn't found me. You know the rest. Johnny nursed me
back to bodily health, and partly to sanity, for he is the sanest thing
ever made. But not quite. Lew has come back cured, but not me, though I
dare say I look all right.'

He turned his weather-beaten, wholesome face to Leithen, and in his eyes
there was an uncertainty which belied the strong lines of mouth and jaw.

'I will tell you the truth,' he said. 'I'm afraid, black afraid of this
damned country. But I can't leave it until I've got on terms with it.
And God knows how that is to be managed.'


3

Leithen found that his slowly mending health was having a marked effect
upon his mind. It was like a stream released from the bondage of frost.
Before, he had been plodding along in a rut with no inclination to look
aside; now he was looking about him and the rut was growing broad and
shallow. Before, he had stopped thinking about his body, for it was
enough to endure what came to it; now he took to watching his sensations
closely, eager to find symptoms of returning strength. This must mean,
he thought, a breakdown of his stoicism, and he dreaded that, for it
might be followed by the timidity which he despised.

But this new mental elasticity enabled him to reflect on the problem of
Galliard--on Galliard himself, who was ceasing to be a mere problem and
becoming flesh and blood. For months Leithen had been insensitive to
human relationships. Even his friends at home, who had warmed and lit
his life, had sunk into the background, and the memory of them, when it
revived, was scarcely an extra pang. His mind had assessed the people he
met in New York, but they might have been ninepins for all he cared
about them, though for Felicity he had felt a certain dim tenderness.
But the return journey from Sick Heart River had wrought a change. His
sudden realisation of the mercifulness behind the rigour of Nature had
made him warm towards common humanity. He saw the quality of Lew and
Johnny, and thanked God for it. Now he was discovering Galliard, and was
both puzzled and attracted by him.

A man--beyond question. Leithen saw that in him which had won him an
enchanting wife and a host of friends. There was warmth, humour,
loyalty. Something more, that something which had made Clifford Savory
insistent that he must be brought back for the country's sake. There was
a compelling charm about him which would always win him followers, and
there was intellect in his brow and eyes. Leithen, accustomed all his
life to judge men, had no doubt about Galliard.

But he was broken. As broken by fear as Lew had been at Sick Heart
River, and, being of a more complex makeup than Lew, the mending would
be harder. A man of a stiff fibre had been confronted by fear and had
been worsted by it. There could be no settlement for Galliard until he
had overcome it.

Leithen brooded over that mysterious thing, the North, a part of the
globe which had no care for human life, which was not built to man's
scale, a remnant of that Ice Age which long ago had withered the earth.
As a young man he had felt its spell when he looked from the
Clairefontaine Height of Land towards the Arctic watershed. The
Gaillard family for generations had felt it. Like brave men they had
gone out to wrestle with it, and had not returned. Johnny, even the
stolid Johnny, had confessed that he had had his bad moments.
Lew--Heaven knows what aboriginal wildness was mingled with his Highland
blood!--had gone hunting for a mystic river and had then got the horrors
of the unknown and fled from it. But he was bred to the life of the
North and could fall back upon its ritual and defy it by domesticating
it. Yet at any moment the fire might kindle again in him. As for
Galliard, he was bound to the North by race and creed and family
tradition; it was not hard for the gods of the Elder Ice to stretch a
long arm and pluck him from among the fleshpots.

What puzzled him was why he himself had escaped. He had had an hour of
revulsion at Sick Heart River, but it had passed like a brief nightmare.
His mind had been preoccupied with prosaic things like cold and
weariness, and his imagination had been asleep. The reason was plain. He
had been facing death, waiting stoically on its coming. There was no
space for lesser fears when the most ancient terror was close to him, no
room for other mysteries when he was nearing the ultimate one.

What had happened to him? Had he come out of the Valley of the Shadow,
or had the Shadow only shifted for a moment to settle later on, darker
and deeper? He deliberately refused to decide. A sense of reverence,
almost of awe deterred him. He had committed himself to God's hands and
would accept with a like docility mercy and harshness. But one thing he
knew--he had found touch with life. He was reacting to the external
world. His mind had feelers out again to its environment. Therefore,
Galliard had assumed a new meaning. He was not a task to be plodded
through with, but a fellow mortal to be helped, a companion, a friend.


4

Johnny and the Hares reached camp when a sudden flurry of snow ended the
brief daylight. Lew and the other Indian ran to receive them, and
presently Galliard joined the group.

'Queer folk in the North,' Leithen thought. 'They don't make much fuss
over a reunion, though it's three weeks since they parted.' Out of the
corner of his eye he saw the team of dogs, great beasts, half wolf, half
Malemute, weighing a hundred pounds each, now sending up clouds of grey
steam into the white snowfall. He had a glimpse, too, of Johnny, who
looked tired and anxious.

The better part of an hour passed, while Leithen sat alone in the hut
mending a pair of moccasins. Then Johnny appeared with a grave face, and
handed him a letter.

'Things ain't goin' too well with them Hares,' he said. 'They've got a
blight on 'em, like Indians get. They're starvin', and they're goin'
mad.'

The letter, written on a dirty half-sheet of mission paper, and secured
between two pieces of birchbark, was from the priest, Father Duplessis,
who had taken Father Wentzel's place for the winter. It was written with
indelible pencil in a foreign-looking, pointed script.

They tell me you are recovering health, my friend, and for your sake I
rejoice. Also for my own, for I am enabled to make you an appeal. My
poor people here are in great sorrow. They have little food, and they
will not try to get more, for a disease has come upon them, a dreadful
_accidie_ which makes them impotent and without hope. Food must be found
for them, and above all they must be roused out of their stupor and made
to wish to live. I wrestle with them, and I have the might of the Church
behind me, but I am alone and I am but a weak vessel. If you can come to
my aid, with God's help we may prevail, but if not I fear this little
people will be blotted out of the book of life.


5

That night after supper four men sat in council. Johnny made his report,
much interrupted by Lew's questions, and once or twice the two Hares
were summoned to give information. Johnny was a very weary man, for his
bandy legs had broken the trail for the dogs through the snow-encumbered
forest, and he had forced the pace for man and beast. His pale blue
eyes, which had none of the brilliance of Lew's, had become small and
troubled. One proof of his discomfort was that when he broke off to
speak to his brother it was in the Cree tongue. Never before had Leithen
heard him use his mother's speech.

Leithen found himself presiding over the council, for the others seemed
to defer to him, after Lew had cross-examined his brother about what
supplies he had brought.

'Father Duplessis says there's trouble in the Hares' camp,' he said.
'Let's hear more about it. Father Wentzel in the fall was afraid of
something of the sort.'

Johnny scratched the tip of one of his bat ears.

'Sure there's trouble. Them goldarned Hares has gone loony, and it ain't
the first time neither. They think they're Christians, but it's a funny
kind of religion, for they're always hankerin' after old bits of magic.
Comin' up in the fall, I heard they'd been consultin' the caribou bone.'

He explained a little shamefacedly.

'It's a caribou's shoulder-blade, and it's got to be an old buck with a
special head of horns. They'd got one and there's a long crack down the
middle, and their medicine-men say that means famine.'

Lew snorted. 'They needn't have gone to an old bone for that. This year
the hares and rabbits have gone sick and that means that every other
beast is scarce. The Hares ain't much in the way of hunters--never have
been--but they know all about rabbits. That's how they've gotten their
name. Maybe you thought they was so-called because they hadn't no more
guts than a hare. That ain't right. They're a brave enough tribe, though
in old days the Crees and the Chipewyans had the upper hand of them. But
the truth is that they haven't much sense, and every now and then they
go plumb crazy.'

'You say they're starving?' Leithen addressed Johnny. 'Is that because
they cannot get food or because they won't try to get it?'

'Both,' was the answer. I figure it out this way. As a general thing
they fish all summer and dry their catch for the winter. That gives 'em
both man's meat and dog's meat. But this year the whitefish and pike was
short in the lakes and the rivers. I heard that in the fall when we
were comin' in. Well, then, it was up to them to make an extra good show
with the fall huntin'. But, as Lew says, the fall huntin' was a washout,
anyhow. Moose and caribou and deer were scarce, because the darned
rabbits had gone sick. It happens that way every seven years or so. So
them pitiful Hares started the winter with mighty poor prospects.'

Johnny spat contemptuously.

'For you and me that would've meant a pretty hard winter's work. There's
food to be got up in them mountains, even after the freeze-up, if you
know where to look for it. You can set bird traps, for there's more
partridges here than in Quebec. You can have deadfalls for deer, and you
can search out the moose's stampin'-grounds. I was tellin' you that the
moose were shiftin' farther north. The Hares ain't very spry hunters, as
Lew says, for they've got rotten guns, but they're dandies at trappin'.
Well, as I was sayin', if it'd been you and me we'd have got busy, and,
though we'd have had to draw in our belts, somehow or other we'd have
won through. But what does them crazy Hares do?'

Johnny spat again, and Lew joined him in the same gesture of scorn.

'They done nothin'! Jest nothin'! The caribou shoulder-blade had 'em
scared into fits. It's a blight that comes on 'em every now and then,
like the rabbit sickness. If a chief dies they mourn for him, sittin' on
their rumps, till they're pretty well dead themselves. In the old
fightin' days what they lost in a battle was nothin' to what they lost
afterwards lamentin' it. So they're takin' their bad luck lyin' down,
and it jest ain't sense. It looks as if that tribe was fixed to be
cleaned out before spring.'

Johnny's contemptuous eyes became suddenly gentle.

'It's a pitiful business as ever I seen. Their old chief--Zacharias they
call him--he must be well on in the eighties, but he's the only one that
ain't smit with paralysis. Him and Father Duplessis. But Zacharias is
mighty bad with lumbago and can't get about enough, and the Father ain't
up to the ways of them savages. He prays for 'em and he argues with 'em,
but he might as well argue and pray with a skunk. A dog whip would be
the thing if you'd the right man to handle it.'

Johnny's melancholy eyes belied his words. They were not the eyes of a
disciplinarian.

'And yet,' he went on, 'I don't know, but I somehow can't keep on bein'
angry with the creatures. They sit in their shacks and but for the women
they'd freeze, for they don't seem to have the strength to keep
themselves warm. The children are bags of bones and crawl about like a
lot of little starved owls. It's only the women that keeps the place
goin', and they won't be able to stick it much longer, for everythin's
runnin' short--food for the fire as well as food for the belly. The
shacks are fallin' into bits and the tents are gettin' ragged, and the
Hares sit like broody hens reflectin' on their sins and calculatin' how
soon they'll die. You couldn't stir 'em if you put a charge of dynamite
alongside of 'em--you'd blow 'em to bits, but they'd die broody.'

'Father Duplessis has the same story,' Leithen said.

'Yep, and he wants your help. I guess he's asked for it. He says it's a
soldier's job and you and him are two old soldiers, but that he's the
private and you're the sergeant-major.'

Galliard, who had been listening with bowed head, suddenly looked up.

'You fought in the War?' he asked.

Leithen nodded. His eyes were on Lew's face, for he saw something there
for which he was not prepared. Lew had hitherto said little, and he had
been as scornful as Johnny about the Hares. The brothers had never shown
any pride in their Indian ancestry; their pride was reserved for the
Scots side. They had treated the Hares with friendliness, but had been
as aloof from them and their like as Leithen and Galliard. It was not
any sense of kinship that had woke the compassion in Lew's face and the
emotion in his voice.

'You can't be angry with the poor devils,' he said. 'It's an act of God,
and as much a disease as T.B. I've seen it happen before, happen to
tougher stocks than the Hares. Dad used to talk about the Nahannis that
once ranged from the Peace to the Liard. Where are the Nahannis today?
Blotted out by sickness of mind. Blotted out like the Snake-Heads and
the White Pouches and the Big Bellies. And the Hares are going the same
way, and then it'll be the turn of the Chipewyans and the Yellow Knives
and the Slaves. We white folk can treat the poor devils' bodies, but we
don't seem able to do anything for their minds.'

No, it was not race loyalty. Leithen saw in Lew and Johnny at that
moment something finer than the duty of kinship. It was the brotherhood
of all men, white and red and brown, who have to fight the savagery of
the North.

His eyes turned to Galliard, who was looking puzzled. He wondered what
thoughts this new situation had stirred in that subtle and distracted
brain.

'We'd better sleep over this,' he announced, for Johnny seemed dropping
with fatigue . . .

Yet Johnny was the last to go to bed. Leithen was in the habit of waking
for a minute or two several times in the night. When his eyes opened
shortly after midnight, he saw Johnny before the fire, not mending it,
but using its light to examine something. It was the shoulder-blade of a
caribou, which he had dug out of the rubbish-heap behind the camp. The
Hares were not the only dabblers in the old magic.


6

Leithen slept ill that night. He seemed to have been driven out of a
sanctuary into the turmoil of the common earth. Problems were being
thrust on him, and he was no longer left to that narrow world in which
he was beginning to feel almost at ease.

Of course he could do nothing about the wretched Hares. Father
Duplessis's appeal left him cold. He had more urgent things to think
about than the future of a few hundred degenerate Indians who mattered
not at all in his scheme of things. His business was with Galliard, who
mattered a great deal. But he could not fix his mind on Galliard, and
presently he realised something which made him wakeful indeed and a
little ashamed. At the back of his head was the thought of his own
health. The curtain which had shut down on his life was lifting a corner
and revealing a prospect. He was conscious, miserably conscious, that
the chief hope in his mind was that he might possibly recover. And that
meant a blind panicky fear lest he should do anything to retard
recovery.

He woke feeling a tightness in his chest and a difficulty in breathing,
from which for some weeks he had been free. He woke, too, to an intense
cold. The aurora had been brilliant the night before; and now in the
pale sky there were sun dogs, those mock suns which attend the extreme
rigours of the North. Happily there was no wind, but the temperature
outside the hut struck him like a blow, and he felt that his power of
resistance had weakened. This was how he had felt on the road to the
Sick Heart River.

He was compelled by his weakness to lie still much of the day, and could
watch the Frizels and Galliard. Something had happened to change the
three--subtly, almost imperceptibly, in Galliard's case, markedly in the
other two. Johnny had a clouded face; he had seen the Hares' suffering
and could not forget it. In Lew's face there were no clouds, but it had
sharpened into a mask of intense vitality, in which his wonderful eyes
blazed like planets. The sight made Leithen uneasy. Lew had shed the
sobriety for which he had been conspicuous in recent weeks. He looked
less responsible, less intelligent, almost a little mad. Leithen,
intercepting his furtive looks, was unpleasantly reminded of the man who
had met him at Sick Heart River. As for Galliard he was neither dejected
nor exalted, but he seemed to have much to think about. He was doing his
jobs with a preoccupied face, and he, too, was constantly stealing a
glance at Leithen. He seemed to be waiting for a lead.

It was this that Leithen feared. For some strange reason he, a sick
man--till the other day, and perhaps still, a dying man--was being
forced by a silent assent into the leadership of the little band. It was
to him that Father Duplessis had appealed, but that was natural, for
they had served together under arms. But why this mute reference to his
decision of the personal problems of all the others? These men were
following the urge of a very ancient loyalty. Perhaps even Galliard. Who
was he to decide on a thing wholly outside his world?

His own case was first in his mind. All his life he had been mixed up in
great affairs. He had had his share in 'moulding a state's decrees' and
'shaping the whisper of a throne.' He had left England when Europe was a
powder magazine and every patriot was bound to put himself at the
disposal of his distracted land. Well, he had cast all that behind
him--rightly, for he had to fight his own grim battle. In that battle he
seemed to have won a truce, perhaps even a victory, and now he was being
asked to stake all his winnings on a trivial cause--the _malaise_ of
human kites and crows roosting at the end of the earth.

It may have been partly due to the return of his malady, but suddenly a
great nausea filled his mind. He had been facing death with a certain
courage because an effort was demanded of him, something which could
stir the imagination and steel the heart. But now he was back among
trivialities. It was not a surrender to the celestial will that was
required of him, but a decision on small mundane questions--how to
return a batch of lunatics to sanity, what risks a convalescent might
safely run? He felt a loathing for the world, a loathing for himself;
so, when Lew sat himself down beside him, he found sick eyes and an
ungracious face.

'We've got to leave,' Lew said. 'We're too high up here for the winter
hunting, and it'll be worse when the big snows come in February. We
should be getting down to the bird country, and the moose country. I
reckon we must take the Hares' camp on our road to see about our stuff.
There's a lot of tea and coffee left cached in the priest's cellar.'

Leithen turned a cold eye on him.

'You want to help the Hares?' he said.

'Why, yes. Johnny and me thought we might give the poor devils a hand.
We could do a bit of hunting for them. We know the way to more than one
moose _ravage_, and a few meals of fresh deer meat may put a little life
into them.'

'That sounds a big job. Am I fit to travel?'

'Sure you're fit to travel! We've got the huskies and we'll go canny.
It's cold, but you'll be as snug in a hole in the snow as in this camp.
When you're in good timber and know the way of it, you can be mighty
comfortable, though it's fifty under. Man! It's what's wanted to set
you up. By the time the thaw-out comes you'll be the toughest of the
bunch.'

'But what can I do? Hunt? I haven't the strength for it, and I should
only be an encumbrance.'

'You'll hunt right enough.'

Lew's frosty eyes had a smile in their corners. He had clearly expected
argument, perhaps contradiction, but Leithen had no impulse to argue. He
was too weary in body and sick in soul.

It was different when Galliard came to him. Here was a man who had
nothing to suggest, one who was himself puzzled. Confined for months to
a small company, Leithen had become quick to detect changes of temper in
his companions. Johnny never varied, but he could read Lew's mutations
like a book. Now he saw something novel in Galliard, or rather an
intensifying of what he had already observed. This man was afraid; there
was something like panic in his face when he allowed it to relax from
restraint. This tale of the Hares' madness had moved him strongly--not,
apparently, to pity, but to fear, personal fear. It was another proof of
the malignity and power of the North.

He was clinging to Leithen through fear, clinging like a drowning man to
a log. Leithen could bring the forces of a different world to fight the
dominance of that old world which had mastered him. He wanted to be
reassured about Leithen, to know that this refuge could be trusted. So
he asked him a plain question.

'Who are you? I know your name. You know my friends. But I know nothing
more about you . . . except that you came out here to die--and may
live.'

The appeal in Galliard's voice was so sincere that his question had no
tinge of brusqueness. It switched Leithen's mind back to a forgotten
world which had no longer any meaning. To reply was like recalling a
dream.

'Yes, you are entitled to ask me that,' he said. 'Perhaps I should have
been more candid with you . . . My name is Edward Leithen--Sir Edward
Leithen--they knighted me long ago. I was a lawyer--with a great
practice. I was for many years a Member of Parliament. I was for a time
the British Attorney-General. I was in the British Cabinet, too--the one
before the present.'

Galliard repeated the name with mystified eyes which seemed straining
after a recollection.

'Sir Edward Leithen. Of course I have heard of you. Many people have
spoken of you. You were for my wife's uncle in the Continental Nickel
case. You had a big reputation in the States . . . You are a bachelor?'

I have no wife or any near relations.'

'Anything else?'

'I don't know. But I was once what I suppose you would call a sportsman.
I used to have a kind of reputation as a mountaineer. I was never sick
or sorry until this present disease got hold of me--except for a little
damage in the War.'

Galliard nodded. 'You told me you were in the War. As what?'

'I was chief staff officer of a rather famous British division.'

Galliard looked at him steadily and in his face there was something like
hope.

'You have done a lot. You are a big man. To think of you roosting with
us in this desert!--two half-breeds, two Indians, and a broken man like
me. By God! Sir Edward, you've got to help me. You've got to get well,
for I'm sunk without you.'

He seized the other's right hand and held it in both his own. Leithen
felt that if he had been a woman he would have kissed it.


7

Galliard's emotion gave the finishing touch to Leithen's depression. He
ate no supper and fell early asleep, only to wake in the small hours
when the fire was at its lowest and the cold was like the clutch of a
dead hand. He managed to get a little warmth by burying his head in the
flap of his sleeping bag. Drowsiness had fled from him, and his brain
was racing like a flywheel.

He had lost all his philosophy. The return of pain and discomfort after
an apparent convalescence had played havoc with his stoicism. Miserably,
penitently, he recalled the moods he had gone through since he had
entered the North. At first there had been sullen, hopeless fortitude, a
grim waiting upon death. There had been a sense of his littleness and of
the omnipotence of God, and a resignation like Job's to the divine
purpose. And then there had come a nobler mood, when he had been
conscious, not only of the greatness but of the mercy of God, and had
realised the vein of tenderness in the hard rock of Fate. He had
responded again to life, and after that response his body seemed to have
laboured to reach the sanity of his mind. His health had miraculously
improved . . . And now he had lost all the ground he had made, and was
down in the dust again.

His obsession was the fear that he would not recover, and--at the heart
of everything--lay the fear of that fear. He knew that it meant that his
whole journey to the North had failed of its true purpose, and that he
might as well be dying among the pillows and comforts of home. The
thought stung him so sharply that he shut his mind to it and fixed his
attention resolutely on the immediate prospect.

Lew and Johnny wanted to go to the Hares' assistance. Lew said that in
any case they must be getting down-country. Once there, they must hunt
both for the Hares' sake and for their own. Lew had said that he,
Leithen, would be able to hunt--arrant folly, for a few days of it in
his present state would kill him.

Had he been a mere subaltern in the party he would have accepted this
programme as inevitable. But he knew that whatever Lew might plan it
would be for him to approve, and ultimately to carry out. The Frizels
were old professionals at the business, and yet it would be he, the
novice, who would have to direct it. His weakness made him strongly
averse to any exertion of mind and body, especially of mind. He might
endure physical torment like a Spartan, but he shrank with horror from
any necessity to think and scheme. Let the Frizels carry him with them
wherever they liked, inert and passive, until the time came when they
could shovel his body into the earth.

But then there was Galliard. He was the real problem. It was to find him
and save him that he had started out. He had found him, but he had yet
to save him . . . Now there seemed to be a way of salvation. The man was
suffering from an ancient fear and there could be no escape except by
facing that fear and beating it. This miserable business of the Hares
had provided an opportunity. Here was a chance to meet one of the
North's most deadly weapons, the madness with which it could affect the
human mind, and, by checking that madness, defeat the North. He had seen
this motive confusedly in Galliard's eyes.

He could not desert a man who belonged to his own world, and who
mattered much to that world, a man, too, who had flung himself on his
mercy. But to succeed in Galliard's business would involve more than
hunting docilely in Lew's company with Lew to nurse him.

As he fell asleep to the sound of one of the Hares making up the morning
fire, he had the queer fancy that the Sick Heart River was dogging them.
It had come out of its chasm and was flowing in their tracks, always
mastering their course and their thoughts. Waters of Death!--or Waters
of Healing?


8

They broke camp on a morning which, as Johnny declared in disgust, might
have been April. In the night the wind had backed to the southwest and
the air was moist and heavy, though piercingly cold. It was the usual
thaw which, in early February, precedes the coming of the big snows.

The sledges were loaded with the baggage and the dogs harnessed. Johnny
and one of the Hares were in charge of them, while Lew went ahead to
break the trail. All of the men except Leithen had back-packs. He
carried only a slung rifle, for Lew had vetoed his wish to take a share
of the burden. The hut was tidied up, all rubbish was burnt, and,
according to the good custom of the North, a frozen haunch of caribou
and a pile of cut firewood were left behind for any belated wanderer.

Leithen looked back at the place which for weeks had been his home with
a sentimental regret of which he was half-ashamed. There he had had a
promise of returning health and some hours of what was almost ease. Now
that promise seemed to have faded away. The mental perturbation of the
last days had played the devil with his precarious strength. His breath
was troubling him again, and his legs had a horrid propensity to buckle
under him. They seemed made of papier-mach, liable both to bend and to
crack.

The first part of the road was uphill, out of the woods into the
scattered spruces, and then to the knuckle of barrens which was the
immediate height of land, and from which he had first had a view of the
great mountain country where the Sick Heart flowed. That ascent of
perhaps three miles was a heavy task for him. Lew mercifully set a slow
pace, but every now and then the dogs would quicken and the rest of the
party had to follow suit. Leithen found that after the first half-mile
his feet were no longer part of his body, his moccasins clogged with the
damp snow, and at each step he seemed to be dragging part of the
hillside after him. His thighs, too, numbed, and he had a sickening ache
in his back. He managed to struggle beyond the tree line into the
barrens, and then collapsed in a drift.

Galliard picked him up and set him on the end of one of the sledges. He
promptly got off and again fell on his face. A whistle from Galliard
brought Lew back, and a glance showed the latter where the trouble lay.

'You got to ride,' he told Leithen. 'The dogs ain't too heavy loaded,
and the ground's easy. If you don't you'll be a mighty sick man, and
there's no camp for a sick man until we get over the divide into the big
timber.'

Leithen obeyed, and finished the rest of the ascent in a miserable
half-doze, his arms slung through the baggage couplings to keep him from
falling off. But at the divide, where a halt was called and tea made, he
woke to find his body more comfortable. He was able to swallow some
food, and when they started again he insisted on walking with Galliard.
They were now descending, and Galliard's arm linked with his steadied
his shambling footsteps.

'You're getting well,' Galliard told him.

'I'm feeling like death!'

'All the same you're getting well. A month ago you couldn't have made
that first mile. You're feeling worse than you did last week, but you've
forgotten how much worse you were a month ago. You remember young
Ravelston, the doctor man? I once heard him say that Nature's line of
recovery was always wavy and up and down, and that if a man got steadily
better without any relapse there was trouble waiting for him.'

Leithen felt himself preposterously cheered by Galliard's words. They
were now descending into the nest of shallow parallel glens which
ultimately led to Lone Tree Lake. They followed the trail which Johnny
had lately taken, and, though it required to be broken afresh owing to
recent snow, it was sufficiently well marked to make easy travelling.
Before the light faded in the afternoon, it was possible for Leithen and
Galliard to lag well behind the sledges without any risk of losing
themselves. The descent was never steep, and the worst Leithen had to
face were occasional slopes of mushy snow where the footholds were bad.
He had a stick to help him, and Galliard's right arm. There was no view,
for the clouds hung low on the wooded ridges, and streamers of mist
choked the aisles of the trees. Exertion had for Leithen taken the sting
out of the cold, and his senses were alive again. There were no smells,
only the bleak odour of sodden snow, but the woods had come out of their
winter silence. The hillside was noisy with running water, and the drip
of thawing spruces.

Galliard had the in-toed walk which centuries ago his race learned from
the Indians. He moved lightly and securely in difficult places where the
other slipped and stumbled, and he could talk with no need to save his
breath.

'You left England a month or two after I left New York. What was the
situation in Europe in the summer? It was bad enough in the spring.'

'I wasn't thinking about Europe then,' Leithen answered. 'You see I did
not see how it could greatly concern me. I didn't give much attention to
the press. But my impression is that things were pretty bad.'

'And in the United States?'

'There I think they took an even graver view. They did not talk about
it, for they thought I should not live to see it. But again my
impression is that they were looking for the worst. I heard Bronson Jane
say something to Lethaby about zero hour being expected in September.'

'Then Europe may have been at war for months. Perhaps the whole world.
At this moment Canadian troops may be on the seas. American, too, maybe.
And up here, on the same continent, we don't know one thing about it.
You and I have dropped pretty completely out of the world, Sir Edward.'

'Supposing there is war,' he went on. 'Sometime or other Lew and Johnny
will get the news. They won't say much, but just make a bee-line for the
nearest end of steel, same as they did in '14. They won't worry what the
war is about. There's a scrap, and Britain is in it, and, being what
they are, they're bound to be in it too. It must be a wonderful thing to
have an undivided mind.'

He glanced curiously at his companion.

'You have that mind,' he said. 'You've got a hard patch to hoe, but
you've no doubts about it.'

'If I live I shall have doubts in plenty,' was the answer. 'But
_you_--you seem to fit into this life pretty well. You go hunting with
Lew as if you were bred to it. You're as healthy as a hound. You have a
body that can defy the elements. What on earth is there for you to fear?
Look at me. I'd be an extra special crock in a hospital for the sick and
aged. You stride like a free man and I totter along like a sick camel.
The cold invigorates you and it paralyses me. You face up to the
brutishness of Nature, and I shrink and cower and creep under cover. You
can defy the North, but my defiance is that the infernal thing can't
prevent my escape by death.'

'You are wrong,' said Galliard solemnly. 'You have already beaten the
North--you have never been in danger--because you know in your heart
that you do not give a cent for it. I am beaten because it has closed in
on me above and below, and I cannot draw breath without its permission.
You say I stride like a free man. I tell you that whatever my legs do my
heart crawls along on sufferance. I look at those hills and I am
terrified at what may lie behind them. I look at the sky and think what
horrid cruelty it is planning--freezing out the little weak sprouts of
life. You would say that the air here is as pure as mid-ocean, but I
tell you that it sickens me as if it came from a charnel house . . .
That's the right word. It's a waft of death. I feel death all around me.
Not swift, clean annihilation, but death with torture and horror in it.
I am in a world full of spectres, and they are worse than the Wendigo
ghoul that the Montagnais Indians used to believe in at home. They said
that you knew it was coming by the smell of corruption in the air. And I
tell you I feel that corruption--here--now.'

Galliard's square weather-beaten face was puckered like an old woman's.
He had given Leithen his arm to support him, and now he pressed the
other's elbow to his side as if the contact was his one security.


9

That night when Leithen stumbled into camp he found that even in the
comfortless thaw Lew had achieved comfort. The camp was made in an open
place away from the dripping trees. The big hollow which the men had dug
with their snowshoes was floored with several layers of spruce branches,
and on a bare patch in the centre a great fire was blazing. The small
tent had been set up for Leithen, but since there was no fall the others
were sufficiently dry and warm on the fir boughs.

Movement and change had revived him, and though his legs and back ached
he was not too much exhausted by the day's journey. Also he found to his
surprise that his appetite had come back. Lew had managed to knock down
a couple of grouse, and Leithen with relish picked the bones of one of
them. All soon went to sleep except Johnny, who was busy mending one of
his snowshoes by the light of the fire.

Leithen watched him through the opening of his tent, a humped,
gnome-like figure that cast queer shadows. He marvelled at his energy.
All day Johnny had been wrestling with refractory dogs. He had been the
chief worker in pitching camp, and now he was doing odd jobs while the
others slept. Not only was his industry admirable; more notable still
were his skill and resourcefulness. There was no job to which he could
not turn his hand. That morning Leithen had admired the knots and
hitches with which he bound the baggage to the sledges--each exactly
appropriate to its purpose, and of a wonderful simplicity. A few days
earlier one of the camp kettles was found to be leaking. Johnny had
shaved a bullet, melted the lead and neatly soldered a patch to cover
the hole . . . He remembered, too, what Galliard had said about the
summons to war. Lew and Johnny were supremely suited to the life which
Fate had cast for them. They had conquered the North by making an
honourable deal with it.

And yet . . . As Leithen brooded in the flicker of the firelight before
he fell asleep, he came to have a different picture. He saw the Indians
as tenuous growths, fungi which had no hold on the soil. They existed on
sufferance; the North had only to tighten its grip and they would
disappear. Lew and Johnny, too. They were not mushrooms, for they had
roots and they had the power to yield under strain and spring back
again, but were they any better than grassy filaments which swayed in
the wind, but might any day be pinched out of existence? Johnny was
steadfast enough, but only because he had a formal and sluggish mind;
the quicker, abler Lew could be unsettled by his dreams. They, too,
lived on sufferance . . . And Galliard? He had deeper roots, but they
were not healthy enough to permit transplanting . . . Compared to his
companions Leithen suddenly saw himself founded solidly like an oak. He
was drawing life from deep sources. Death, if it came, was no blind
trick of fate, but a thing accepted and therefore mastered. He fell
asleep in a new mood of confidence.


10

In the night the wind changed, and the cold became so severe that it
stirred the men out of sleep and set them building up the fire. Leithen
awoke to an air which bit like a fever, and a world which seemed to be
made of metal and glass.

The cold was more intense than anything he had ever imagined. Under its
stress trees cracked with a sound like shots from machine guns. The big
morning fire made only a narrow circle of heat. If for a second he
turned his face from it the air stung his eyelids as if with an infinity
of harsh particles. To draw breath rasped the throat. The sky was
milk-pale, the sun a mere ghostly disc, and it seemed to Leithen as if
everything--sun, trees, mountains--were red-rimmed. There was no shadow
anywhere, no depth or softness. The world was hard, glassy, metallic;
all of it except the fantasmal, cotton-wool skies.

The cold had cowed the dogs, and it was an easy task to load the
sledges. Leithen asked Johnny what he thought the temperature might be.

'Sixty below,' was the answer. 'If there was any sort of wind I reckon
we couldn't have broke camp. The dogs wouldn't have faced it. We'd have
had to bury ourselves all day in a hole. Being as it is, we ought to
make good time. Might make Lone Tree Lake by noon tomorrow.'

Leithen asked if the cold spell would last long.

'A couple of days. Maybe three. Not more. A big freeze often comes
between the thaw and the snows. The Indians call it the Bear's Dream.
The cold pinches the old bear in his den and gives him bad dreams.'

He sniffed the air.

'We're gettin' out of the caribou country, but it's like they'll be
round today. They're not so skeery in a freeze. You keep a rifle handy,
and you'll maybe get a shot.'

Leithen annexed Johnny's Mnnlicher and filled the magazine. To his
surprise the violent weather, instead of numbing him, had put life into
his veins. He walked stiffly, but he felt as if he could go on for
hours, and his breath came with a novel freedom. Galliard, who also
carried a rifle, remarked on his looks as they followed the sledges.

'Something has come over you,' he said. 'Your face is pasty with the
cold, but you've got a clear eye, and you're using your legs different
from yesterday. Feeling fine?'

'Fair,' said Leithen. 'I'm thankful for small mercies.'

He was afraid to confess even to himself that his body was less of a
burden than it had been for many months. And suddenly there woke in him
an instinct to which he had long been strange, the instinct of the
chase. Once he had been a keen stalker in Scottish deer forests, but of
late he had almost wholly relinquished gun and rifle. He had lost the
desire to kill any warm-blooded animal. But that was in the old settled
lands, where shooting was a sport and not a necessity of life. Here in
the wilds, where men lived by their marksmanship, it was a duty and not
a game. He had heard Lew say that they must get all the caribou they
could, since it was necessary to take a load of fresh meat into the
Hares' camp. Johnny and the Indians were busy at the sledges, and Lew
had the engrossing job of breaking the trail, so such hunting as was
possible must fall to him and Galliard.

He felt a boyish keenness which amazed and amused him. He was almost
nervous. He slung his Zeiss glass loose round his neck and kept his
rifle at the carry. His eyes scanned every open space in the woods which
might hold a caribou.

Galliard observed him and laughed.

'You take the right side and I'll take the left. It'll be snap-shooting.
Keep your sights at two hundred yards.'

Galliard had the first chance. He swung round and fired standing at what
looked to Leithen to be a grey rock far up on the hillside. The rock
sprang forward and disappeared in the thicket.

'Over!' said a disgusted voice. The caravan had halted and even the dogs
seemed to hold their breath.

Leithen's chance came half an hour later. The sledges were toiling up a
hill where the snow lay thin over a maze of tree-roots, and the pace was
consequently slow. His eyes looked down a long slope to a little lake;
there had been a bush fire recently, so the ground was open except for
one or two skeleton trunks and a mat of second-growth spruce. Something
caught his eye in the tangle, something grey against the trees,
something which ended in what he took to be withered boughs. He saw that
they were antlers.

He tore off his right-hand mitt and dropped on one knee. He heard
Galliard mutter 'three hundred,' and pushed up his sights. The caribou
had its head down and was rooting for moss in the snow. A whistle from
Galliard halted the sledges. The animal raised its head and turned
slightly round, giving the chance of a rather difficult neck shot.

A single bullet did the job. The caribou sank on the snow with a broken
spine, and the Indians left the sledges and raced downhill to the
gralloch.

'Good man!' said Galliard, who had taken Leithen's glass and was
examining the kill.

'A bull--poorish head, but that doesn't matter--heavy carcase. Every
inch of three hundred and fifty yards, and a very prettily placed shot.'

'At home,' said Leithen, 'I should have guessed a hundred and twenty.
What miraculous air!'

He was ashamed of the childish delight which he felt. He had proved that
life was not dead in him by bringing off a shot of which he would have
been proud in his twenties.

The caribou was cut up and loaded on one of the sledges, maddening the
dogs with the smell of fresh meat. For the rest of the afternoon
daylight Leithen moved happily in step with Galliard. The road was easy,
the extreme cold was abating, he felt a glow of satisfaction which he
had not known for many a day. He was primitive man again who had killed
his dinner. Also there was a new vigour in his limbs, not merely the
absence of discomfort and fatigue, but something positive, a plus
quantity of well-being.

When they made camp he was given the job of attending to the dogs, whose
feet were suffering. The Malemutes, since their toes were closer
together, were all right, but with the huskies the snow had balled and
frozen hard, and in biting their paws to release the congested toes they
had broken the skin and left raw flesh. Johnny provided an antiseptic
ointment which tasted evilly and so would not be licked off. The beasts
were wonderfully tractable, as if they knew that the treatment was for
their good. Leithen had always been handy with dogs, and he found a
great pleasure in looking into their furry, wrinkled faces, and sniffing
their familiar smell. Here was something which belonged most intimately
to the North and yet had been adapted to the homely needs of man.

That night he dined with relish off caribou steaks and turned early to
bed. But he did not fall asleep at once. There was a pleasant ferment in
his brain, for he was for the first time envisaging what life would be
if he were restored to it. He allowed his thoughts to run forward and
plan.

It was of his friends that he thought chiefly, of his friends and of one
or two places linked with them. Their long absence from his memory had
clarified his view of them, and against the large background of
acquaintances a few stood out, who, he realised, were his innermost and
abiding comrades. None of his colleagues at the Bar were among them, and
none of his fellow politicians. With them he had worked happily, but
they had remained on the outer rim of his life. The real intimates were
few, and the bond had always been something linked with sport and
country life. Charles Lamancha and John Palliser-Yeates had been at
school and college with him, and they had been together on many
hillsides and by many waters. Archie Roylance, much younger, had
irrupted into the group by virtue of an identity of tastes and his own
compelling charm. Sandy Clanroyden had been the central star, radiating
heat and light, a wandering star who for long seasons disappeared from
the firmament. And there was Dick Hannay, half Nestor, half Odysseus,
deep in Oxfordshire mud, but with a surprising talent for extricating
himself and adventuring in the ends of the earth.

As he thought of them Leithen felt a glow of affection warm his being.
He pictured the places to which they specially belonged: Lamancha on the
long slopes of Cheviot; Archie Roylance on the wind-blown, thymy moors
of the west; Sandy in his Border fortress; and Dick Hannay by the clear
streams and gentle pastures of Cotswold. He pictured his meeting with
them--restored from the grave. They had never been told about his
illness, but they must have guessed. Sandy, at least, after that last
dinner in London. They must have been talking about him, lamenting his
absence, making futile enquiries . . . He would suddenly appear among
them, a little thinner and older, perhaps, but the same man, and would
be welcomed back to that great companionship.

How would he spend his days? He had finished with his professions, both
law and politics. The State must now get on without him. He would be
much at Borrowby--thank Heaven, he had not sold it! He would go back to
his Down Street rooms, for though he had surrendered the lease he would
find a way of renewing it. He had done with travel; his last years would
be spent at home among his friends. Somebody had once told him that a
man who recovered from tuberculosis was pretty well exempt from other
maladies. He might live to an old age, a careful, moderate old age,
filled with mild pleasures and innocent interests . . . On the pillow of
such thoughts he fell asleep.


11

The snow began just as they reached Lone Tree Lake. At first it came
gently, making the air a dazzle of flakes, but not obscuring the near
view. At the lake they retrieved the rest of their cached supplies, and
tramped down its frozen surface until they reached its outlet, a feeder
of the Big Hare, now under ten feet of ice and snow. Here the snow's
softness made the going difficult, for the Northern snowshoes offered
too narrow a surface. The air had become almost mild, and that night,
when a rock shelf gave them a comparatively dry bivouac, Leithen
deliberately laid his blankets well away from the fire.

Next day they halted to hunt, looking for fresh meat to take to the
Hares' camp. Johnny and Lew found a small stamping-ground of moose, and
since in the snow the big animals were at a disadvantage, they had no
difficulty in getting two young bulls. Leithen helped to drag in the
meat and found that the change in the weather had not weakened his new
vigour. His mind was in a happy maze, planning aimlessly and making
pictures which he did not try to complete.

Lew watched him with satisfaction.

'I've got to learn you things,' he said. 'You haven't the tricks, and
you're wasting your strength, but'--he repeated his old phrase--'you're
going to be the huskiest of the lot of us. And I seen you shoot!'

They reached the Hares' camp late on an afternoon, when the snow had so
thickened that it had the look of a coarse-textured cloth ceaselessly
dropped from the skies. Huts, tents, the little church, were for the
moment buried under the pall. Lew chose a camping-site about a quarter
of a mile distant, for it was important to avoid too close a contact at
first with the stricken settlement.

Johnny and the Indians went off to prospect. Half an hour later Johnny
returned with startled eyes.

'I got news,' he stammered. 'The Father told me--seems there was a dog
team got down to the Fort, and come back. There's fightin' in
Europe--been goin' on for months. Seems it's them darned Germans again.
And Britain's in it. Likewise Canada.'


12

The taller Indian spoke from behind Johnny.

'My father is dead,' he said, and slipped back into the dusk.

'Yes,' said Johnny, 'there's been a lot of deaths among them Hares.
Their camp's like a field hospital. Talkin' of field hospitals, what
about this war?'

'We'll sleep on that,' Leithen answered.

Lew did not open his mouth, nor did Galliard. Supper was prepared and
eaten in silence, and each man by tacit consent went immediately to his
blankets. Leithen, before turning in, looked at the skies. The snowfall
was thinning, and the air was sharpening again. There was an open patch
in the west and a faint irradiation of moonshine. Tomorrow would be very
cold.

His bodily well-being continued. The journey down from the mountains had
left its mark, for his face was scarred by patches of frostbite, his
lips were inflamed, the snowshoes had made the calves of his legs ache
like a bad tooth, and under his moccasins his feet were blistered.
Nevertheless he felt that vigour had come back to him. It reminded him
of his mountaineering days, when he would return to London with
blistered cheeks and aching shoulder muscles and bleared eyes, and yet
know that he was far fitter than the smoothly sunburnt creature that
emerged from a holiday at home.

But though his body craved for it, his mind would not permit of sleep.
He had been living with life, and now suddenly death seemed to have
closed down on the world. The tall Indian's cry rang in his ears like a
knell.

What had become of the bright pictures he had been painting?

The world was at war again and somewhere in Europe men were grappling
with death. The horrors of campaigning had never been much in his mind,
for as a soldier he had been too busy to brood over the _macabre_. But
now a flood of dimly remembered terrors seemed to flow in upon him--men
shot in the stomach and writhing in no-man's land; scarecrows that once
were human, crucified on the barbed wire and bleached by wind and sun;
the shambles of a casualty clearing station after a battle.

His thoughts had been dwelling on his reunion with friends. Those
friends would all be scattered. Sandy Clanroyden would be off on some
wild venture. Archie Roylance would be flying, game leg and all. Hannay,
Palliser-Yeates, Lamancha, they would all be serving somehow and
somewhere. He would be out of it, of course. A guarded flame, a
semi-invalid, with nothing to do but to 'make' his soul . . . As he fell
asleep he was ashamed of his childishness. He had promised himself a
treat which was not going to come off, and he was whining about it.

He woke with a faint far-off tinkle in his ears. He had been dreaming of
war and would not have been surprised if he had heard a bugle-call. He
puzzled over the sound until he hit on the explanation. Father Duplessis
in his little church was ringing the morning Angelus.

That tinny bell had an explosive effect on Leithen's mind. This was a
place of death, the whole world was full of death--and yet here was one
man who stood stubbornly for life. He rang the bell which should have
started his flock on their day's work. Sunk in weakness and despair they
would remain torpid, but he had sounded the challenge. Here was one man,
at any rate, who was the champion of life against death.

13

It was a silent little band that broke camp and set out in the late
winter dawn. Johnny's face was sullen with some dismal preoccupation,
and Lew's eyes had the wildness of the Sick Heart River, while
Galliard's seemed to have once again the fear which had clouded them
when he was recovering from his exhaustion.

To his surprise Leithen found that this did not depress him. The bell
still tinkled in his ears. The world was at war again. It might be a
twilight of the gods, the end of all things. The globe might swim in
blood. Death might resume his ancient reign. But, by Heaven! he would
strike his blow for life, even a pitiful flicker of it.

The valley opened before them. Frost had stiffened the snow to marble,
and they were compelled to take off their snowshoes, which gave them no
foothold. The sky was a profound blue and the amphitheatre of peaks
stood out against it in a dazzling purity, matched below by the unbroken
white sheet of the lake. The snow was deep, for the near woods were so
muffled as to have lost all clean contours, and when they came to the
flat where the camp lay the wretched huts had no outlines. They might
have been mounds to mark where the dead lay in some Hyperborean
graveyard. Only the little church on the higher ground looked like the
work of men's hands. From the adjoining presbytery rose a thin wisp of
smoke, but elsewhere there was no sign of humanity.

Lew spoke at last.

'God! The Hares have gone to earth like chipmunks! Or maybe they're all
dead.'

'Not all,' said one of the Indians, 'but they are dying.'

They soon had evidence. They passed a small grove of spruce and poplar,
and in nearly every tree there was a thing like a big nest, something
lashed to snowy boughs. Lew nodded towards them. 'That's their
burying-ground. It's new since we was here before.' Leithen thought
freakishly of Villon and 'King Louis's orchard close.' There were funny
little humps, too, on the flat, with coverings of birch and spruce
branches peeping from under the snow.

'Them's graves,' said Johnny. 'The big ones go up in the trees, the
smaller ones are under them humps, and them of no account, like babies
and old folk, just get chucked out into the drifts. There's been a power
o' dyin' here.'

Lew turned to Leithen for orders.

'Which comes first,' he asked, 'Zacharias or the priest?'

'We will go to the presbytery,' was the answer.


14

There was at first no sign of life in the irregular street of huts that
made the ascent to the presbytery. The roofs of some of them were
sagging with the weight of snow, and one or two had collapsed. But there
were people in them, for, now that they were seen at closer quarters,
wraiths of smoke came from the vents, which proved that there were fires
within, though very meagre ones. Once a door opened and a woman looked
out; she at once drew back with a scared look like an animal's; a
whimper of a child seemed to come from indoors.

Then suddenly there rose a wild clamour from starving dogs picketed in
the snow. Their own dogs answered it and the valley resounded with the
din. After the deathly quiet the noise seemed a horrid impiety. There
was nothing in it of friendly barking; it was like the howling of a
starving wolf pack lost and forgotten at the world's end.

The sound brought Father Duplessis to the presbytery door. He was about
Leithen's own age, but now he looked ten years older than at Fort
Bannerman. Always lean, he was now emaciated, and his pallor had become
almost cadaverous. He peered and blinked at the newcomers, and then his
face lit up as he came forward with outstretched hands.

'God be praised!' he cried. 'It is my English comrade-in-arms.'

'Get hold of the chief,' Leithen told Johnny. 'Take the Indians with you
and make a plan for distributing the meat. Then bring Zacharias up
here.'

He and Galliard and Lew followed the priest into the presbytery. In
Father Wentzel's time the place had smelt stuffy, like a furniture
store. Now it reeked of ether and carbolic, and in a corner stood a
trestle table covered with a coarse linen cloth. He remembered that
Father Duplessis was something of a doctor.

He was also most clearly a soldier, a soldier tired out by a long and
weary campaign. There was nothing about him to tell of the priest
except the chain which showed at his neck and which held a cross tucked
under his shirt. He wore kamiks and a dicky of caribou skin and a parka
edged with wolverine fur, and he needed all his clothing, for the
presbytery was perishing cold. He might have been a trapper or a
prospector but for his carriage, his squared shoulders and erect head,
which showed the discipline of Saint-Cyr. His silky brown beard was
carefully combed and trimmed. A fur skull-cap covered the head where the
hair had been cut to the bone. He had the long, high-bridged nose of
Picardy gentlefolk, and a fine forehead, round the edges of which the
hair was greying. His blue eyes looked washed out and fatigued, but the
straight lines of the brows gave an impression of power in reserve. The
osseous structure of his face was as sharply defined as the features on
a newly minted coin.

'Thank Heaven, you have come,' he said. 'This campaign is too hard for
one man. And perhaps I am not the man. In this task I am only a
subaltern and I need a commanding officer.'

He looked first at Galliard and then at Leithen, and his eyes remained
on the latter.

'We are fighting a pestilence,' he went on, 'but a pestilence of the
soul.'

'One moment,' Leithen broke in. 'What about this war in Europe?'

'There is war,' said the priest gravely. 'The news came from the Fort
when I sent a dog team for supplies. But I know no more than that the
nations are once again at each other's throats. Germany with certain
allies against your country and mine. I do not think of it--Europe is
very far away from my thoughts.'

'Supplies? What did you get?'

'Not much. Some meal and flour, of which a balance remains. But that is
not the diet for the poor folk here. Also a little coffee for myself.
See, I will make you a cup.'

He bustled for a minute or two at the stove, and the pleasant odour of
coffee cut sharply into the frowst of the room.

'A pestilence of the mind?' Leithen asked. 'You mean--?'

'In myself--and in you--it would be called _accidie_, a deadly sin. But
not, I think, with this people. They are removed but a little way from
the beasts that perish, and with them it is an animal sickness.'

'They die of it?'

'But assuredly. Some have T.B. and their sickness of the mind speeds up
that disease. Some are ageing and it makes them senile, so that they
perish from old age. With some it unhinges the wits so that the brain
softens. Up to now it is principally the men who suffer, for the women
still fight on, having urgent duties. But soon it will mean the children
also, and the women will follow. Before the geese return in spring, I
fear, I greatly fear, that my poor people will be no more in the land.'

'What are you doing about it?'

Father Duplessis shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands.

'There is little I can do. I perform the offices of the Church, and I
strive to make them worship with me. I preach to them the way of
salvation. But I cannot lift them out of the mire. What is needed is
men--a man--who will force their life again into a discipline, so that
they will not slip away into death. Someone who will give them hope.'

'Have you no helpers?'

'There is the chief Zacharias, who has a stout heart. But he is old and
crippled. One or two young men, also, but I fear they are going the way
of the rest.'


15

Leithen had asked questions automatically and had scarcely listened to
the replies, for in that dim, stuffy, frigid presbytery, where the only
light came through the cracks in the door and a dirty window in the
roof, he was conscious of something in the nature of a revelation. His
mind had a bitter clarity, and his eyes seemed to regard, as from a high
place, the kingdoms of the world and men's souls.

His will was rising to the same heights. At last, at long last, his own
course was becoming crystal clear.

Memories of the war in which he had fought raced before him like a
cinema show, all in order and all pointing the same truth. It had been
waste, futile waste, and death, illimitable, futile death. Now the same
devilment was unloosed again. He saw Europe as a carnage pit--shattered
towns, desecrated homes, devastated cornlands, roads blocked with the
instruments of war--the meadows of France and of Germany, and of his own
kind England. Once again the free peoples were grappling with the slave
peoples. The former would win, but how many free men would die before
victory, and how many of the unhappy slaves!

The effluence of death seemed to be wafted to his nostrils over the many
thousand miles of land and sea. He smelt the stench of incinerators and
muddy trenches and bloody clothing. The odour of the little presbytery
was like that of a hospital ward.

But it did not sicken him. Rather it braced him, as when a shore-dweller
who has been long inland gets a whiff of the sea. It was the spark which
fired within him an explosive train of resolution.

There was a plain task before him, to fight with Death. God for His own
purpose had unloosed it in the world, ravening over places which had
once been rich in innocent life. Here in the North life had always been
on sufferance, its pale, slender shoots fighting a hard battle against
the Elder Ice. But it had maintained its brave defiance. And now one
such pathetic slip was on the verge of extinction. This handful of Hares
had for generations been a little enclave of life besieged by mortality.
Now it was perishing, hurrying to share in the dissolution which was
overtaking the world.

By God's help that should not happen--the God Who was the God of the
living. Through strange circuits he had come to that simple forthright
duty for which he had always longed. In that duty he must 'make' his
soul.

There was a ring of happiness in his voice. 'You have me as a helper,'
he said. 'And Mr. Galliard. And Lew and Johnny. Between us we will save
your Hares from themselves.'

Lew's face set, as if he had heard something which he had long feared.

'You mean we've got to feed 'em?'

Leithen nodded. 'Feed them--body and mind.'

Lew's eyebrows fell.

'You coming out in the woods with us? I guess that's the right thing for
you.'

'No, that's your job, and Johnny's. I stay here.'

Lew exploded. Even in the dimness his eyes were like points of blue
fire.

'Hell!'he cried. 'You can't do it! You jest can't do it! I was afeared
you'd have that dam' foolish notion. Say, what d'you think life here
would be like for you? You're on the road to be cured, but you ain't
cured yet. Come out with me and Johnny and you'll be living healthy. We
won't let you do too much. It's a mighty interesting job hunting moose
in their _ravages_ and you'll get some fine shooting. We'll feed you the
kind of food that's good for you, and at night we'll make you as snug as
a wintering bear. I'll engage by the spring you'll be a mighty strong
man. That's good sense, ain't it?'

'Excellent good sense. Only it's not for me. My job is here.'

'Man, I tell you it's suicide. Fair suicide. I've seen plenty cases like
yours, and I've seen 'em get well and I've seen 'em die. There's one
sure way to die and that's to live in a shack or among shacks, and
breathe stinking air, and be rubbing shoulders with sick folks, and
wearing your soul out trying to put some pep into a herring-gutted
bunch of Indians. You'll be sicker than ever before a week is out, and a
corp in a month, and that'll be darned little use to anybody.'

Lew's soft, rich voice had become hoarse with passion. He got up from
his seat and stood before Leithen like a suppliant, with his hands
nervously intertwining.

'You may be right,' Leithen said. 'But all the same I must stay. It
doesn't matter what happens to me.'

'It matters like hell,' said Lew, and there was that in his voice which
made the presbytery a solemn place, for it was the cry of a deep
affection.

'This is a war and I obey orders. I've got my orders. In a world where
Death is king, we're going to defy him and save life. The North has
closed down on us and we're going to beat the North. That is to your
address, Galliard.'

Galliard was staring at him with bright, comprehending eyes.

'In this fight we have each got his special job. I'm in command, and I
hand them out. I've taken the one for myself that I believe I can do
best. We're going to win, remember. What does my death matter if we
defeat Death?'

Lew sat down again with his head in his hands. He raised it like a
frightened animal at Leithen's next words.

'This is my Sick Heart River. Galliard's, too, I think. Maybe yours,
Lew. Each of us has got to find his river for himself, and it may flow
where he least expects it.'

Father Duplessis, back in the deep shadows, quoted from the Vulgate
psalm, '_Fluminis impetus laetificat civitatem Dei_.'

Leithen smiled. 'Do you know the English of that, Lew? _There is a
river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God._ That's what
you've always been looking for.'


16

The place was suddenly bright, for the door had opened. A wave of icy
air swept out the frowst, and Leithen found himself looking into a
radiant world, rimmed with peaks of bright snow and canopied by a sky so
infinitely far away that it had no colour except that of essential
light.

It was the old chief, conducted by Johnny. Zacharias was a very mountain
of a man, and age had made him shapeless, while lumbago had bent him
nearly double. He walked with two sticks, and Johnny had to lower him
delicately to a seat. The Hares were not treaty Indians, but
nevertheless he wore one of the soup-plate Victorian silver medals,
which had come to him through a Cree grandmother. His heavy face had a
kind of placid good sense, and age and corpulence had not dimmed the
vigour of his eye.

He greeted Leithen ceremonially, realising he was the leader of the
newcomers. He had a few words of English, but Johnny did most of the
interpreting. He sat with his hands on his knees, like a schoolboy
interviewed by a head master, but though his attitude suggested
nervousness his voice was calm.

'We are a ver' sick people,' he repeated several times. It was his chief
English phrase.

What he had to tell was much the same story that Johnny had brought to
the mountain camp. But since then things had slipped farther downhill.
There had been more deaths of children and old people, and even of
younger men. They did not die of actual starvation, but of low diet and
low spirits. Less than half a dozen went hunting, and not many more
brought in fuel, so there was little fresh meat and too little firewood.
People sat huddled in icy shacks in all the clothes they could find, and
dreamed themselves into decay. The heart had gone out of them. The
women, too, had ceased to scold and upbraid, and would soon go the way
of their menfolk.

'Then our people will be no more,' said Zacharias grimly.

Leithen asked what help he could count on.

'There is myself,' said the chief, 'and this good Father. I have three
sons who will do my bidding, and seven grandsons--no, five, for two are
sick. There may be a few others. Say at the most a score.'

'What would you advise?'

The old man shook his head.

'In our fathers' day the cure would have been a raid by Chipewyans or
Dog-Ribs! Then we should have been forced to be up and doing or perish.
A flight of arrows is the best cure for brooding. Now--I do not know.
Something harsh to get the sullenness out of their bones. You are a
soldier?'

'The Father and I served in the same war.'

'Good! Soldiers' ways are needed. But applied with judgment, for my
people are weak and they are also children.'

Leithen spoke to the company.

'There are a score of us for this job, then. Mr. Galliard and I stay
here. Lew and Johnny go hunting, and will take with them whom they
choose. We shall need all the dog teams we can get to bring back meat
and cordwood. But first there are several jobs to be done. You've got to
build a shack for Mr. Galliard and myself. You've got to get a mighty
big store of logs, for a fire must be kept burning day and night.'

He was addressing Lew, whose eyes questioned him.

'Why? Because these people must be kept in touch with life, and life is
warmth and colour. A fire will remind them that there is warmth and
colour in the world . . . Tomorrow morning we will have a round-up and
discover exactly what is the size of our job . . . You've made camp,
Johnny? Mr. Galliard and I will be there by supper-time. Now you and Lew
go along and get busy. We've a lot to do in the next few days.'

The door opened again and disclosed the same landscape of primitive
forms and colours, its dazzle a little dimmed by the approach of
evening.

This second glimpse had a strange effect on Leithen, for it seemed to be
a revelation of a world which he had forgotten. His mind swooped back on
it and for a little was immersed in memories. Zacharias was hoisted to
his feet and escorted down the hill. Father Duplessis prepared a simple
meal. There was a little talk about ways and means after Lew left,
Galliard questioning Leithen and getting answers. Yet all the time the
visualising part of Leithen's mind was many thousands of miles away in
space and years back in time.

The stove had become too hot, so the door was allowed to remain
half-open, for the year had turned, and the afternoon sun was gaining
strength. So his eyes were seeing a segment of a bright-coloured world.
The intense pure light brought a flood of pictures all linked with
moments of exultant physical vigour. Also with friendships. He did not
probe the cause, but these pictures seemed to imply companionship. In
each, Archie Roylance, or Clanroyden, or Lamancha was just round the
corner waiting . . . There was a July morning, very early on the
Nantillons Glacier, on his way to make a traverse of the Charmoz which
had once been famous. There was a moonlit night on an Aegian isle when
he had been very near old mysteries. There were Highland dawns and
twilights--one especially, when he sat on a half-submerged skerry
watching for the wild geese--an evening when Tir-nan-og was manifestly
re-created. There were spring days and summer days in English meadows,
Border bent with the April curlews piping, London afternoons in May with
the dear remembered smells fresh in his nostrils . . . In each picture
he felt the blood strong in his veins and a young power in his muscles.
This was the man he once had been.

Once! He came out of his absorption to realise that these pictures had
not come wholly through the Ivory Gate. He was no longer a dying man. He
had been reprieved on the eve of execution, and by walking delicately
the reprieve might be extended. His bodily strength was like a fragile
glass vessel which one had to carry while walking on a rough road; with
care it might survive, but a jolt would shatter it . . . No, that was a
false comparison. His health was like a small sum of money, all that was
left of a big fortune. It might be kept intact by a stern economy, or it
might be spent gallantly on a last venture.

Galliard and Father Duplessis were sitting side by side and talking
earnestly. He caught a word of the priest's '_Dieu fait bien ce qu'il
fait_,' and remembered the quotation. Was it La Fontaine? He laughed,
for it fitted in with his own mood.

He had found the right word both for Galliard and himself. They were
facing the challenge of the North, which a man must accept and repel or
submit to servitude. Lew and Johnny and their kind did not face that
challenge; they avoided it by walking humbly; they conciliated it by
ingenious subterfuges; its blows were avoided and not squarely met, and
they paid the price, for every now and then they fell under its terrors.

He was facing, too, the challenge of Death. Elsewhere in the world the
ancient enemy was victorious. If here, against all odds, he could save a
tiny germ of life from its maw he would have met that challenge, and
done God's work.

Leithen's new-found mission gave him a happy retrospect over his own
career. At first, when he left England, he had looked back with pain at
the bright things now forbidden. In his first days in the North his old
world had slipped from him wholly, leaving only a grey void which he
must face with clenched teeth and a grim submission. He smiled as he
remembered those days, with their dreary stoicism. He had thought of
himself as like Job, as one whose strength lay only in humbleness. He
had been crushed and awed by God.

A barren creed! He saw that now, for its foundation had been pride of
defiance, keeping a stiff neck under the blows of Fate. He had been
abject, but without true humility. When had the change begun? At Sick
Heart River, when he had a vision of the beauty which might be concealed
in the desert? Then, that evening in the snowpit had come the
realisation of the tenderness behind the iron front of Nature, and after
that had come thankfulness for plain human affection. The North had not
frozen him, but had melted the ice in his heart. God was not only
all-mighty but all-loving. His old happiness seemed to link in with his
new mood of thankfulness. His stream of life, which had flowed so
pleasantly, had eternity in its waters. He felt himself safe in the
hands of a power that was both God and friend.

Father Duplessis was speaking and Galliard was listening earnestly. He
seemed to be quoting the New Testament--'_Heureux sont les morts qui
meurent dans le Seigneur_.'

He had been inhuman, Leithen told himself, with the dreary fortitude of
a sick animal. Now, whatever befell him, he was once again in love with
his fellows. The cold, infernal North magnified instead of dwarfing
humanity. What a marvel was this clot of vivified dust! . . . The
universe seemed to spread itself before him in immense distances lit and
dominated by a divine spark which was man. An inconsiderable planet, a
speck in the infinite stellar spaces; most of it salt water; the bulk of
the land rock and desert and austral and boreal ice; interspersed mud,
the detritus of aeons, with a thin coverlet of grass and trees--that
vegetable world on which every living thing was in the last resort a
parasite! Man, precariously perched on this rotating scrap-heap, yet so
much master of it that he could mould it to his transient uses, and,
while struggling to live, could entertain thoughts and dreams beyond the
bounds of time and space! Man so weak and yet so great, the chief
handiwork of the Power that had hung the stars in the firmament!

He was moved to a strange exaltation. Behind his new access of strength
he felt the brittleness of his body. His stock of vigour was slender,
indeed, but he could spend it bravely in making his soul. Most men had
their lives taken from them. It was his privilege to _give_ his, to
offer it freely and joyfully in one last effort of manhood. The North
had been his friend, for it had enabled him, like Jacob, to wrestle with
the dark angel and extort a blessing.

The presbytery had warmed up and Galliard had fallen asleep. He slept
with his mouth shut, breathing through his nose, and the sleeping face
had dignity and power in it. It would be no small thing to release this
man from ancestral fear and gird him for his task in the world. In
making his own soul, he would also give back Galliard his. He would win
the world, too, for now the great, shining, mystic universe about him
was no longer a foe but a friend, part with himself of an eternal plan.

Father Duplessis's voice broke in on his meditation and seemed to give
the benediction words. He was reading his breviary, and broke off now
and then to translate a sentence aloud in his own tongue. '_Car celui
qui voudra sauver sa vie la perdra; et celui qui perdra sa vie pour
l'amour de moi la retrouvera._'


17

/#
     _From a report by Corporal S---- R.C.M.P., Fort Bannerman, to
     Inspector N---- R.C.M.P., Fort Macleod_
#/

. . . Pursuant to instructions received, I left Fort Bannerman on the
twenty-first day of April, accompanied by Constable F----, and after
some trouble with my dog team arrived at the Hares' winter camp on Big
Hare Lake at six-thirty P.M. on the twenty-second. The last part of the
journey was in the dark, but we were guided by a great blaze coming
apparently from the camp, which was visible from the outlet of the lake.
At first I thought the place was on fire, but on arrival found that this
evening bonfire had become a regular custom.

Rumours of distress among the Hares had reached Fort Bannerman during
the winter. Father Wentzel, on his return to the Fort, had predicted a
bad time, and Father Duplessis, who replaced him, had sent an urgent
message asking, not only for supplies of food, but for someone to go up
and advise. I duly reported this to you, and received your instructions
to take an early opportunity of visiting the camp. This opportunity I
was unable to find for several months, since the Force was short-handed,
owing to the departure of men to the Provost Company in France, and, as
you are aware, I was compelled to make two trips to Great Bear Lake in
connection with the dispute at the Goose Bay Mine. So, as stated above,
I could not leave Fort Bannerman until the twenty-first inst.

Constable F---- and I were put up by Father Duplessis, and I received
from him a satisfactory account of the condition of the Hare tribe. They
are now in good health, and, what is more important, in good heart, for
it seems that every now and then they get pessimism, like the measles,
and die of it, since it prevents their looking for food. It appeared
that they had had a very bad bout in the winter, of the risk of which
Father Wentzel had warned us. Up to the beginning of February they were
sitting in their huts doing nothing but expecting death, and very soon
getting what they expected. A schedule attached to this report gives the
number of deaths, and such details as could be ascertained.

The Hares were saved by an incident which I think is the most remarkable
I have ever heard of in my long experience of the Territory. In the
early fall a party went into the Mackenzie Mountains, travelling up the
Big Hare River to a piece of country which has been very imperfectly
explored. Or rather, two parties who ultimately joined hands. The party
consisted of an American gentleman named Galliard, a New York business
man, and an Englishman named Leithen. It had with it two Hare Indians,
and as guides the brothers Frizel. The Frizels, Lew and Johnny, are men
of high character and great experience. They both served with
distinction in the ---- Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in
the last war, and have long been favourably known to the Police. The
younger, until recently, was a game warden at the National Park at
Waskesieu.

I received further information about the Englishman, Leithen. It appears
that he was Sir Edward Leithen, a famous London lawyer and a British
Member of Parliament. He was suffering from tuberculosis, and had
undertaken the expedition with a view to a cure. The winter in the high
mountains, where the weather has been mild for a Mackenzie River winter,
had done him good, and he was believed to be on the way to recovery.

The party, coming out early in February, reached the Hares' camp to find
it in a deplorable condition. Sir E. Leithen at once took charge of the
situation. He had been a distinguished soldier in the last war--in the
Guards, I believe--and he knew how to handle men. With Mr. Galliard to
help him, who had had large administrative experience in America, and
with the assistance of Father Duplessis and the old chief Zacharias,
they set to work at once.

Their first job was to put some sense into the Hares. With the help of
the Frizels, who knew the tribe well, a number of conferences were held,
and there was a lot of straight talk. Father Duplessis said that it was
wonderful how Sir E. Leithen managed to strike the note which most
impressed the Indian mind.

This, of course, was only the beginning. The next step was to organise
the survivors into gangs, and assign to each a special duty. Food was
the most urgent problem, for the Hares had been for a long time on very
short commons, and were badly undernourished. As you are aware, the
moose have been moving north in recent years. The two Frizels, with a
selected band of Hares, made up a hunting party, and, knowing how to
find the moose stamping-grounds, were able to send in a steady supply of
fresh meat. They also organised a regular business of trapping hares and
partridges, at which the Hares are very skilful, but which they had been
too dispirited to attempt.

The tribe had also got short of fuel, so woodcutting parties were
organised. Sir E. Leithen insisted on a big fire being kept going by
night and day in the centre of the camp, in order to hearten the people.

Transport was a serious problem. The dogs of the tribe had been allowed
to become very weak from starvation, and many had died, for the fishing
in the summer had been poor and the store of dried fish, which they use
for dog food, was nearly exhausted. Sir E. Leithen made them start again
their winter fishing through the ice in the lake. Here they had a bit of
luck, for it turned out very productive, and it was possible to get the
dogs back into condition. This was important, since the dog teams were
in constant demand, to haul in firewood from the woodcutters and fresh
meat from the hunters.

The Frizels did the field work, and Sir E. Leithen and Mr. Galliard
managed the camp. I am informed by Father Duplessis that Leithen
obtained almost at once an extraordinary influence over the Hares'
minds. 'Far greater than mine,' the Father said, 'though I have been
living for years among them.' This was partly due to his great ability
and the confidence he inspired, but partly to the fact that he had been
a very sick man, and was still regarded by the Hares as a sick man. The
Indians have a superstitious respect for anyone whom they believe to be
facing death.

Sick man or not, in a month Sir E. Leithen had worked little short of a
miracle. He had restored a degenerating tribe to something like health.
He made them want to live instead of being resigned to die.

And now, sir, I come to the event which kills all satisfaction in this
achievement. It seems that the elder Frizel had repeatedly warned Sir E.
Leithen that the work which he was undertaking would undo all the good
of his sojourn in the high mountains, and would lead to certain death;
but that Sir E. Leithen had declared that that work was his duty, and
that he must take the risk. Frizel's prophecy proved only too true.

I understand that his strength slowly declined. The trouble with his
lungs revived, and, while he continued to be the directing mind, his
power of locomotion gradually lessened. Lew Frizel, who came in
frequently from the bush to enquire into his health, and implored him in
vain to lessen his efforts, told me that by the end of March he had
reached the conclusion that nothing could save him. The shack in which
he lived was next door to the presbytery, and Father Duplessis, who has
some knowledge of medicine, did his best to supply treatment. According
to his account, the malady was such that only a careful life could have
completed the cure begun in the mountains, and Sir E. Leithen's
exertions by night and day were bound to bring it back in a violent
form. The sick man, the Father told me, attended the Easter Mass, and
after that was too weak to move. Myocarditis set in, and he died
without pain during the night of April nineteenth.

As I have already informed you, I arrived with Constable F---- on the
evening of the twenty-second. The camp was in mourning, and for a little
there seemed a danger of the Hares slipping back to their former state
of melancholy supineness. From this they were saved by the exhortations
of Father Duplessis, and especially by Lew Frizel, who told them they
could only show their love for Sir E. Leithen by continuing the course
he had mapped out for them. Also, the tribe was now in a better mood, as
spring was very near.

Mr. Galliard was anxious that Sir E. Leithen should be buried at a spot
in Quebec Province for which he had a special liking. On April
twenty-fourth we started by dog team with the body, the party being
myself, Constable F----, Mr. Galliard, and the two Frizels. We had
considerable difficulty with the ice in the Big Hare River, for the
thaw-out promised to be early. We reached Fort Bannerman on the
twenty-fifth, and were able, by radio, to engage a plane from Edmonton,
Mr. Galliard being willing to pay any price for it.

I have since heard by radio that the destination at Quebec was safely
reached. The two Frizels were dropped at Ottawa, it being their
intention, at all costs, to join the Canadian Forces in Europe . . .


18

/#
     _An extract from the journal of Father Jean-Marie Duplessis,
     O.M.I., translated from the French_
#/

In this journal, which I have now kept for more than twenty years, I
shall attempt to set down what I remember of my friend. I call him my
friend, for, though our intercourse was measured in time by a few weeks,
it had the intimacy of comradeship in a difficult undertaking. Let me
say by way of prologue that during our friendship I saw what is not
often vouchsafed to mortal eyes, the rebirth of a soul.

In the fall I had talked with L. at Fort Bannerman. He was clearly a man
in bad health, to whom the details of living were a struggle. I was
impressed by his gentleness and his power of self-control, but it was a
painful impression, for I realised that it meant a continuous effort. I
felt that no circumstances could break the iron armour of his fortitude.
But my feeling for him had warmth in it as well as respect. We had been
soldiers in the same campaign, and he knew my home in France.

When things became bad early in the New Year, I was in doubt whom to
turn to. Father Wentzel at Fort Bannerman was old and feeble; and I
could not expect the Police to spare me a man. Besides, I wanted
something more than physical assistance. I wanted a man of education who
could understand and cope with the Hares' _malaise_. So when one of L.'s
guides reached the camp in early February, I thought at once of him, and
ventured to send him a message.

It was a shot at a venture, and I was not prepared for his ready
response. When he arrived with Galliard I was surprised by the look of
both. I had learned from Father Wentzel that Galliard was a man sick in
the spirit, and I knew that L. was sick in body. Now both seemed to have
suffered a transformation. Galliard had a look of robust health, though
there was that in his manner which still disquieted me--a lack of
confidence, an air of unhappy anticipation, a sense of leaning heavily
upon L. As for L., he was very lean and somewhat short of breath, but
from my medical experience I judged him to be a convalescent.

The first day the party spent with me I had light on the situation. L.
was all but cured--he might live for years with proper care. But proper
care meant life in the open, no heavy duties, and not too much exertion.
On this, one of the hunters, Louis Frizelle, insisted passionately.
Otherwise, he said, and Galliard bore him out, that in a little time he
would be dead. This L. did not deny, but was firm in his resolution to
take up his quarters in the camp and to devote all his powers to saving
what was left of the Hare tribe. On this decision plans were made, with
the successful result explained in the Police corporal's report, which I
here incorporate . . .

At first I thought that L.'s conduct was that of a man of high
humanitarian principles, who could not witness suffering without an
attempt at relief. But presently I found that the motives were subtler,
and if possible nobler, and that they involved his friend, Galliard. L.,
not being of the Church, made no confessions, and he did not really
speak of himself, but in the course of our work together I was able to
gather something of his history.

We talked first, I remember, about the war in Europe. I was deeply
apprehensive about the fate of my beloved France, which once again in my
lifetime would be bled white by war. L. seemed curiously apathetic about
Europe. He had no doubts about the ultimate issue, and he repeated more
than once that the world was witnessing again a contest between Death
and Life, and that Life would triumph. He saw our trouble with the Hares
as part of the same inscrutable purpose of the Almighty, and insisted
that we were on one battle-front with the allies beyond the Atlantic.
This he said often to Frizelle, whom it seemed to comfort.

I observed that as the days passed he showed an increasing tenderness
towards the Hares. At first I think he regarded their succour as a cold,
abstract duty. But gradually he began to feel for them a protective and
brotherly kindness. I suppose it was the gift of the trained lawyer, but
he mastered every detail of their tribal customs and their confused
habits of thought with a speed that seemed not less than miraculous. He
might have lived most of his life among them. At first, when we sat at
the conferences and went in and out of the huts, his lean, pallid face
revealed no more than the intellectual interest which might belong to a
scientific enquirer. But by degrees a kind of affection showed in his
eyes. He smiled oftener, and his smile had an infinite kindliness. From
the beginning he dominated them, and the domination became in the end,
on their part, almost worship.

What is the secret, I often ask myself, that gives one human being an
almost mystical power over others? In the War I have known a corporal
have it, when it was denied to a general of division. I have seen the
gift manifest in a parish priest and lacking in an archbishop. It does
not require a position of authority, for it makes its own authority. It
demands a strong pre-eminence in brain and character, for it is based on
understanding, but also, I think, on an effluence of sincere affection.

I was puzzled at first by the attitude of Galliard. He was a Catholic
and had resumed--what he had for a time pretermitted--the observances of
the Church. He came regularly to Mass and confession. He was ultimately
of my own race, though _Les Canadiens_ differ widely from _Les Franais
de France_. He should have been easy for me to comprehend, but I confess
that at first I was at a loss. He was like a man under the spell of a
constant fear--not panic or terror, but a vague uneasiness. To L. he was
like a faithful dog. He seemed to draw strength from his presence, as
the mistletoe draws strength from the oak.

What was notable was his steady advance in confidence till presently his
mind was as healthy as his body. His eye cleared, his mouth no longer
twitched when he spoke, and he carried his head like a soldier. The
change was due partly to his absorption in his work, for to L. he was a
right hand. I have rarely seen a man toil so devotedly. But it was
largely due to his growing affection for L. When the party arrived from
the mountains, he was obviously under L.'s influence, but only in the
way in which a strong nature masters a less strong. But as the days
passed, I could see that his feeling was becoming a warmer thing than
admiration. The sight of L.'s increasing weakness made his face often a
tragic mask. He fussed as much as the elder Frizelle over L.'s health.
He would come to me and implore my interference. 'He is winning,' he
would repeat, 'but it will be at the cost of his life, and the price is
too high.'

Bit by bit I began to learn about Galliard, partly from L. and partly
from the man himself. He had been brought up in the stiff tradition of
_Les Canadiens_, had revolted against it, and had locked the door on his
early life. But it was the old story. His ancestry had its revenge, a
revenge bound to be especially harsh, I fancy, in the case of one of his
breeding. He had fled from the glittering world in which he had won
success, and from a devoted wife, to the home of his childhood. And here
came a tangle of motives. He had in his blood the pioneer craving to
move ever farther into the wilds; his family, indeed, had given more
than one figure to the story of Arctic exploration. He conceived that he
owed a duty to the family tradition which he had forsaken, and that he
had to go into the North as an atonement. He also seems to have
conceived it as part of the penance which he owed for the neglect of his
family religion. He is a man, I think, of sentiment and imagination
rather than of a high spirituality.

But his penance turned out severer than he dreamed. He fell into a
_malaise_ which, it is my belief, was at the bottom the same as the
Hares' affliction, and which seems to be endemic in the North. It may be
defined as fear of the North, or perhaps more accurately as fear of
life. In the North, man, to live, has to fight every hour against
hostile forces; if his spirit fails and his effort slackens, he
perishes. But this dread was something more than a rational fear of a
potent enemy. There was superstition in it, a horror of a supernatural
and desperate malevolence. This set the Hares mooning in their shacks
awaiting death, and it held Galliard, a man of education and high
ability, in the same blind, unreasoning bondage. His recovered religion
gave him no defence, for he read this fear as part of the price to be
paid for his treason.

Then L. came on the scene. He saved Galliard's life. He appeared when
Frizelle, in a crazy fit, had deserted him, and he had come from England
in the last stage of a dire sickness to restore Galliard to his old
world. In L.'s grim fortitude Galliard found something that steadied his
nerves. More, he learned from L. the only remedy for his _malaise_. He
must fight the North and not submit to it; once fought and beaten, he
could win from it, not a curse, but a blessing.

Therefore he eagerly accepted the task of grappling with the Hares'
problem. Here was a test case. They were defying the North; they were
resisting a madness akin to his own. If they won, the North had no more
terrors for him--or life either. He would have conquered his ancestral
fear.

Then something was added to his armour. He had revered L., and soon he
came to love him. He thought more of L.'s bodily well-being than of his
own nerves. And in forgetting his own troubles he found they had
disappeared. After a fortnight in the camp he was like the man in the
Scriptures out of whom the evil spirit was cast--wholly sane and at
peace, but walking delicately.

    *    *    *    *    *

But L. was my chief concern. I have said that in him I witnessed the
rebirth of a soul, but that is not quite the truth. The soul, a fine
soul, was always there. More, though not of the Church, I do not
hesitate to say that he was of the Faith. _Alias oves habeo quae non
sunt ex hoc ovili._ But he had been frozen by a hard stoicism which
sprang partly from his upbringing and partly from temperament. He was a
strong man with an austere command of himself, and when he had to face
death, he divested himself of all that could palliate the suffering, and
stood up to it with a stark resolution which was more Roman than
Christian. What I witnessed was the thawing of the ice.

He had always bowed himself before the awful majesty of God. Now his
experience was that of the Church in the thirteenth century, when they
found in the Blessed Virgin a gentle mediatrix between mortal and
divine. Or perhaps I should put it thus: that he discovered that
tenderness and compassion which Our Lord came into the world to preach,
and, in sympathy with others, he lost all care for himself. His noble,
frosty egoism was merged in something nobler. He had meant to die in the
cold cathedral of the North, ceasing to live in a world which had no
care for life. Now he welcomed the humblest human environment, for he
had come to love his kind; indeed, to love everything that God had made.
He once said (he told me he was quoting an English poet) that he
'carried about his heart an awful warmth like a load of immortality.'

When I first met him at Fort Bannerman, he seemed to me the typical
Englishman, courteous, aloof, the type I knew well in the War. But now
there seemed to be a loosening of bonds. He talked very little, but he
smiled often, and he seemed to radiate a gentle, compelling courtesy.
But there was steel under the soft glove. He had always the air of
command, and the Hares obeyed his lightest word as I am certain they
never obeyed any orders before in their tribal history. As his strength
declined, he could speak only in a whisper, but his whispers had the
authority of trumpets. For he succeeded in diffusing the impression of a
man who had put all fear behind him and was already in communion with
something beyond our mortality.

He shared his confidences with no one. Galliard, who had come to regard
him with devotion, would never have dared to pierce his reserve. I tried
and failed. With him I had not the authority of the Church, and, though
I recognised that he was nearing death, I could not offer the
consolations of religion unless he had asked for them. I should have
felt it an impiety, for I recognised that in his own way he was making
his soul. As the power of the sun waxed, he liked to bask in it with his
eyes shut, as if in prayer or a daydream. He borrowed my Latin Bible and
read much in it, but the book would often lie on his knees while he
watched with abstracted eyes the dazzle of light on the snow of the far
mountains.

It is a strange fact to chronicle, but I think his last days were his
happiest. His strength was very low, but he had done his work and the
Hares were out of the pit. Galliard tended him like a mother or a
sister, helped him to dress and undress, keeping the hut warm, cooking
for him and feeding him. The hunters, the Frizelles and the Hares, came
to see him on every return journey. Old Zacharias would remain for hours
near his door in case he might be summoned. But all respected his
privacy, for they felt that he had gone into retreat before death. I saw
him oftenest, and the miracle was that, as the spring crept back to the
valley, there seemed to be a springtime in his spirit.

He came often to Mass--the last occasion being the High Mass at Easter,
which for the Hares was also a thanksgiving for recovery. The attendance
was now exemplary. The little church with its gaudy colouring--the work
of old Brother Onsime, and much admired by Father Wentzel--was crowded
to the door. The Hares have an instinct for ritual, and my acolytes
serve the altar well, but they have none for music, and I had found it
impossible to train much of a choir. L. would sit in a corner following
my Latin with his lips, and he seemed to draw comfort from it. I think
the reason was that he was now sharing something with the Hares, and was
not a director, but one of the directed. For he had come to love those
poor childish folk. Hitherto a lonely man, he had found a clan and a
family.

After that Easter Sunday his body went fast downhill. I do not think he
suffered much, except from weakness. His manner became gentler than
ever, and his eyes used often to have the pleased look of a good child.
He smiled, too, often, as if he saw the humour of life. The
huskies--never a very good-tempered pack, though now they were well
fed--became his friends, and one or two of the older beasts would
accompany him out-of-doors with a ridiculous air of being a bodyguard.
One cold night, I remember, one of them suddenly ensconced itself in an
empty box outside the presbytery door. I can still hear L. talking to
it. 'I know what you're saying, old fellow: "I'm a poor dog and my
master's a poor man. I've never had a box like this to sleep in. Please
don't turn me out."' So there it remained--the first time I have seen a
husky with ambitions to become a house-dog.

He watched eagerly for the signs of spring. The first was the return of
the snow buntings, shimmering grey flocks which had wintered in the
South. These he would follow with his eyes as they fluttered over the
pine woods or spread themselves like a pied shadow on the snow. Then the
mountain we call Baldface suddenly shed most of its winter covering, the
noise of avalanches punctuated the night, and the upper ribs were
disclosed, black as ink in the daytime, but at evening flaming into the
most amazing hues of rose and purple. I knew that he had been an
alpinist of note, and in these moments I fancy he was recapturing some
of the activities of his youth. But there was no regret in his eyes. He
was giving thanks for another vision of the glory of God.

The last time he was able to go abroad, Galliard and I assisted him down
to the edge of the lake. There was still a broad selvedge of ice--what
the Canadian French call _batture_--but in the middle the ice was
cracking, and there were lanes of water to reflect the pale blue sky.
Also the streams were being loosed from their winter stricture. One
could hear them talking under their bonds, and in one or two places the
force of water had cleared the boulders and made pools and cascades . .
. A wonderful thing happened. A bull moose, very shaggy and lean, came
out of the forest and stood in an open shallow at a stream's mouth. It
drank its fill, and then raised its ugly head, shook it, and stared into
the sunset. Crystal drops fell from its mouth, and the setting sun
transfigured the beast into something magical, a beneficent dragon out
of a fairy-tale. I shall never forget L.'s delight. It was as if he had
his last sight of the beauty of the earth, and found in it a pledge of
the beauty of Paradise, though I doubt if there will be anything like a
bull moose in the Heavenly City . . .

Three days later he died in his sleep. There was no burial, for Galliard
wished the interment to be at his old home in Quebec. The arrival of two
of the R.C.M.P. made it possible to convey the body to Fort Bannerman,
whence it would be easy to complete the journey by air.

Such is my story of the end of a true man-at-arms whose memory will
always abide with me. He was not of the Church, but beyond doubt he died
in grace. In his last hours he found not peace only but beatitude. _Dona
aeternam quietem, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei._


19

The chief beauty of the Canadian spring is its air of fragility. The
tints are all delicate; the sky is the palest blue, the green is faint
and tender, with none of the riot of an English May. The airy distances
seem infinite, for the mind compels the eye to build up other lands
beyond the thin pencilled horizons.

A man and a woman were sitting on the greening turf by the well of the
Clairefontaine stream. The man wore a tweed suit of a city cut, but he
had the colour and build of a countryman. The woman had taken off her
hat, and a light wind was ruffling her hair. Beneath them was a flat pad
of ground, and on it, commanding the sources of both the north- and
south-flowing rivulets, was a wooden cross which seemed to mark a
grave.

The eyes of both were turned northward where the wooded hills, rising
sometimes to rocky scarps, shepherded the streams to the Arctic
watershed.

Galliard slowly filled a pipe. His face had filled out, and his jaw was
firmer. There were now no little lines of indecision about his mouth.
Also his eyes were quiet and content.

For a little the two did not speak. Their eyes followed the slender,
north-flowing stream. It dropped almost at once into a narrow ravine,
but it was possible to mark where that ravine joined a wider valley, and
where that valley clove its way into the dark tangle of forested
mountains.

'What happens away up there?' the woman asked. 'I should like to follow
the water.'

'It becomes a river which breaks into the lowlands and wanders through
muskegs and bush until it reaches the salt. Hudson's Bay, you know.
Dull, shallow tides at first, and then the true Arctic, ice-bound foe
most of the year. Away beyond are the Barrens, and rivers of no name,
and then the Polar Sea, and the country where only the white bear and
the musk ox live. And at the end a great solitude. Some day we will go
there together.'

'You don't fear it any more?'

'No. It has become part of me, as close to me as my skin. I love it. It
is myself. You see, I have made my peace with the North, faced up to it,
defied it, and so won its blessing. Consider, my dear. The most vital
forces of the world are in the North, in the men of the North, but only
when they have annexed it. It kills those who run away from it.'

'I see,' she said, after a pause. 'I know what you mean. I think I feel
it . . . But the Sick Heart River! Wasn't that a queer fancy?'

Galliard laughed. 'It was the old habit of human nature to turn to
magic. Lew Frizel wanted a short cut out of his perplexities. So did I,
and I came under the spell of his madness. First I came here. Then I
went to the Ghost River. Then I heard Lew's story. I was looking for
magic, you see. We both had sick hearts. But it was no good. The North
will always call your bluff.'

'And Leithen? He went there, didn't he?'

'Yes, and brought Lew away. Leithen didn't have a sick heart. He was
facing the North with clear eyes. He would always have won out.'

'But he died!'

'That was victory--absolute victory . . . But Leithen had a _fleuve de
rve_ also. I suppose we all have. It was this little stream. That's why
we brought his body here. It is mine, too--and yours--the place we'll
always come back to when we want comforting.'

'Which stream?' she asked. 'There are two.'

'Both. One is the gate of the North and the other's the gate of the
world.'

She faced round and looked down the green cup of the Clairefontaine. It
was a pleasant pastoral scene, with none of the wildness of the
other--the white group of farm buildings in the middle distance and the
patches of ploughland, and far beyond a blue shimmer which was the St.
Lawrence. The woman laughed happily.

'That is the way home,' she said.

'Yes, it is the way home--to our home, Felicity, which, please God, will
never again be broken. I've a lot of atoning to do. The rest of my life
cannot be long enough to make up to you for what you have suffered.'

She stroked his hair. 'We'll forget all that. We're starting afresh, you
know. This is a kind of honeymoon.'

She stopped and gazed for a little at the glen, which suddenly
overflowed with a burst of sunlight.

'It is also the way to the wars,' she said gravely.

'Yes, I'm bound for the wars. I don't know where my battle-front will
be. In Europe, perhaps, or maybe in New York or Washington. The North
hasn't sent me back to malinger.'

'No, of course not. But, anyhow, we're together--we'll always be
together.'

The two by a common impulse turned their eyes to the wooden cross on the
lawn of turf.

Galliard rose. 'We must hurry, my dear. The road back is none too good.'

She seemed unwilling to go. 'I feel rather sad, don't you? You're
leaving your captain behind.'

Galliard turned to his wife, and she saw that in his eyes which made her
smile.

'I can't feel sad,' he said. 'When I think of Leithen, I feel
triumphant. He fought a good fight, but he hasn't finished his course. I
remember what Father Duplessis said--he knew that he would die; but he
knew also that he would live.'


THE END


PRESS OF THE HUNTER-ROSE CO. LIMITED, TORONTO


Transcriber's Note:

Page 15--typo "statute" changed to "statue"

Page 319--missing word "as" added after "It was"






[End of Sick Heart River, by John Buchan]
