"Then in a choking whisper I muttered, 'Who are you?'
"And he answered me, 'Your baser self.'
"I looked for a way of escape, but he stood between me and the mouth of the shaft; to get out I would have had to pass him. I tried to make him speak with me again that I might draw him aside, and so might slip past him and get above ground; but he refused to stir. Then I grew fascinated, and went near him, and peered into his face. He was like me, yet unlike; he was more evil—what I might become at my worst. He was to me what you were, when you just now arrived, to the man whom I loved in London, and who saved my life in Tagish Lake. Having studied his body and his face I loathed him, and drew myself away to the farthest hiding-place. There I crouched beside the gold streak for ten hours until the last glow of fire had died out, and I was left in darkness. Then, though I could not see him, I knew that he was there.
"At last Mordaunt came and called to me. I begged him to come down. Thinking I was wounded, he lit a lantern and descended in haste. As he approached, I looked to see where myself had been standing; but, though I had felt him there the moment before, directly Mordaunt came he vanished. In my horror I told Mordaunt everything—and what do you think the little fellow did? Instead of laughing at me, or fleeing from me for his life because I was mad, he set down his lamp and, throwing his arms about me, knelt down there on the bed-rock and prayed. If it hadn't been for Mordaunt I should certainly have killed you in the days which followed. Whenever I was alone or in your company, that thing, which was my baser self, was there. He would stand behind you, so that you could not see him, with his hand upraised as if about to strike. He would beckon to me that I also should get behind you, and when you spoke to me contemptuously or harshly the evil of his face would reflect a like passion in me against you. But whenever Mordaunt was present he vanished, and I had rest from temptation; therefore I say that Mordaunt saved you.
"I kept on hoping that when spring came I would be able to leave, and thus rid myself of my evil dread; but the longer I stayed the greater grew my peril. At length the crisis came.
"You had been down river across the ice to Dawson on the spree and to arrange for the carriage of your bullion to Seattle. It was night, and I was just returning from the shaft, where I had been giving a last look to the burning. I had a rifle in my hand, and, as I arrived at the door of the cabin, raising my eyes, saw you coming up-stream with your dogs, with your head bent low as if you were tired. Also I saw in the moonlight that that other was noiselessly following you, stride by stride, stealing up behind. I saw him waving his arms to me, gesticulating madly and signing to me to kneel down and fire.
"Suddenly all power of resistance left me; with my eyes upon his face, the memory of all the wrongs which you had dealt me, and my hatred of you, swam uppermost in my mind. I knelt down in the snow to take steadier aim and had my finger on the trigger, when the gun was snatched from behind. I turned fiercely round and found Mordaunt standing there. 'Quick,' he said, 'come inside.' He thrust the rifle beneath a pile of furs, and bade me tumble into my bunk and pretend sleep. Shortly after, I heard you come in and say that one of your dogs had been shot dead; but I did not stir. You came over and gazed down suspiciously at me, but seemed satisfied with Mordaunt's account of how I had been lying there for the past two hours wearied out with the day's work. Next day I could not look you in the eyes; also the memory of a woman I had loved had come suddenly back and changed me, making me ashamed. So two nights later I gathered together the few things I had and, abandoning my claim, fled.
"If I could not trust myself with you, I could not trust myself in the Yukon. Every miner travelling with gold seemed to me a possible victim for my crime. I went about in fear lest I should see that evil thing, which called himself myself, returning to keep me company through life. I fled to escape him and, hoping to leave him behind me in the Klondike, went over the winter trail to Skaguay, the route by which two years earlier we had fought our way up, took steamer to Vancouver and came on thence to Winnipeg. My money was all but exhausted when I got there, I was broken in spirit and at my wit's end. By chance I met with Wrath, on whose claim in our first winter we had worked. He had gone back to his independent trading, and, at my request for employment, sent me up here to look after his interests at Murder Point. I was glad to come; after my experience on the Sleeping River, I was distrustful of myself in the company of men, never knowing when that foreshadowing of my evil desires might not return to hound me on to fresh villainies and despair. For one who wished to be alone, Heaven knows, I chose well. You're not burdened with too much society in Keewatin—that isn't the complaint which is most often heard."
Outside the night had long since settled down—a night which with snow and starlight was not dark, but shadowy and ghostlike, making the interval between two days a long-protracted dusk beneath which it was possible to see for miles. Far away in the forest a timber-wolf howled dismally; the huskies in the river-bed, seated on their haunches, lifted up their heads and echoed his complaint. Then all was still again, nothing was audible except the occasional low booming of the ice, when a crack rent its path across the surface and far below the river shook its gyves, as though clapping its hands in expectation of the freedom of the spring to come.
Against the window the silhouette of Spurling loomed up, with the drifting dimness of the starlight for background, and the square of surrounding darkness for a frame of sombre plush; he seemed a man-portrait whom some painter had condemned forever to motionlessness and silence with the magic of his brush, and had nailed on a stretcher, and had hung up for ornament.