But as quickly his expression changed. Presently, when he arose and strode over to the fire, a hard, uncanny light flickered over his face—a face whose intense pallor accentuated the blackness of his extraordinary eyes. Framed in the close-fitting muskrat cap, it was a face that bespoke undeveloped power, strikingly handsome in its mephistophelian mould and portending a sagacity beyond its years.
He stood with arms outstretched to the setting sun, for the moment transformed to a pagan chieftain, and from his lips there issued the single word, “Kee-am!” which in the Indian means: “Nothing matters!”
“The gold mine goes to—” Slowly he repeated the dead man’s injunction. The lids of his black eyes narrowed until they became slits of flame and the lines of his mouth set close-pressed and cruel.
But when he turned and addressed the corpse his features relaxed and his voice was gutturally soft and musical: “It shall be as you willed, my kindest friend—but, for the present, the mine is lent to me.”
The sun, now a great, boiling globe under a fanlike glaze of scarlet, eased down upon the bleak western ranges, bordering their purple-shrouded crests with a narrow edging of brightest gold; hesitated one brief second in fiery farewell, then plunged behind the ragged rim of the northern world. Night swept with swift stealth across the wilderness, transforming it to a realm of spectrelike shadows.
A solemn hush, like a requiem of Nature for the day that was dead, fell over the forests.
The lone figure by the camp fire bent forward strangely as though gripped by an inward paroxysm.
As he did so, the deeps of the woods vibrated with a long-drawn, unearthly cry that echoed and re-echoed its fearsome notes far in the hills. It had seemed to rise from nowhere, a howl neither human nor bestial, but a demoniac blending of both; half anguished wail, half mocking laughter.
No prowling timber wolf broke the succeeding silence with an answering call. Even the wolf-dog in the sled pack cowered deeper in his snowy bed in whimpering fear.