"Desert you! If you knew how lonely I have been you wouldn't ask that question."
"I ought to know," he answered, and going over to the window looked out, turning his head from side to side in that furtive manner which Granger had noted in him when he had first seen him advancing across the ice.
Facing about suddenly, he asked, "Is there any way out of here, except down there?" pointing to the river frozen in its bed, stretching away interminably to the west, through groves of icicles, and marble forest, like a granite roadway hewn out and levelled by a giant, vanished race.
"There is no other," Granger replied, "unless you include the way out which is trodden by the dead."
Spurling started almost angrily at the mention of this last pathway of escape, and scowled. It was evident that the fear which made his life a burden was the fear of death—which was proof to Granger that he had not been long in Keewatin. However, he controlled himself and murmured, "Six hundred and eighty miles is a long journey, and it's all that to Winnipeg. Within a fortnight the ice will break, and then for almost a month the only way will be impassable. Thank God for that!" Addressing himself to Granger, "And what lies ahead?" he asked.
"The forest and three hundred odd miles of this Last Chance River till you come to the Hudson Bay and the House of the Crooked Creek."
"Is there nothing in between?"
"Only the Forbidden River, which neither white man nor Indian ever travels; it joins the Last Chance a hundred miles ahead."
"Ah, the Forbidden River! And no one ever travels there! Why not? Is it shallow or rapid? But then there is the winter; it cannot be that there's anything that doesn't freeze up here."
"Oh, it freezes right enough."