“Isn’t that all the better?” Ned demanded. “God knows I’m glad to see any kind of a man.”
After all, wasn’t that good sense? Trapping, fox-farming, any one of a dozen undertakings took white men into these northern realms. Conquering his own ridiculous fears—fears that partook of the nature of actual forewarnings—Knutsen drove his oars with added force into the water. The boat leaped forward: in a moment more they touched the bank.
Their deliverer, a great blond man seemingly of Northeastern Europe, was already at the water’s edge, watching them with a strange and inexplicable glitter in gray, sardonic eyes. He was a mighty, bearded man, clothed in furs; already he was bent, his hands on the bow of the boat. Already Ned was climbing out upon the shore.
Partly to remove the silly dismay that had overwhelmed him, partly because it was the first thought that would come to the mind of a wayfarer of the sea, Knutsen turned with a question. “What island is dis?” he asked.
The stranger turned with a grim, meaning smile. “Hell,” he answered simply.
Both Ned and Knutsen stood erect to stare at him. The wind made curious whispers down through the long slit of the river valley. “Hell?” Knutsen echoed. “Is dat its name——”
“It’s the name I gave it. You’ll think it’s that before you get away.”
XIII
The stranger’s voice was deep and full, so far-carrying, so masterful, that it might have been the articulation of the raw elements among which he lived, rather than the utterance of human vocal chords. It held all his listeners; it wakened Lenore from the apathy brought by cold and exposure. They had wondered, at first, that a member of the white race should make his home on this remote and desolate isle, but after they had heard his voice they knew that this was his fitting environment. If any man’s home should be here, in this lost and snowy desert, here was the man.
The background of the North was reflected in his voice. It was as if he had caught its tone from the sea and the wild, through long acquaintance with them. It was commanding, passionate, and yet, to a man of rare sensitiveness, it would have had an unmistakable quality of beauty; at least, something that is like beauty and which can be heard in many of Nature’s voices: the chant of the wolf pack on the ridge, or even certain sounds of beating waves. The explanation was simply that he had lived so long in the North, he was so intrinsically its child in nature and temperament, that it had begun to mold him after its own raw forces. The fact that his voice had a deeply sardonic note was wholly in character. The North, too, has a cruel, grim humor that breaks men’s hearts.