“Kazan, Kazan,” he pleaded, weakly, “it isn’t time— yet!”
Kazan had gone to the window that looked to the west, and stood with his forefeet on the sill. Pelliter shivered.
“Wolves again,” he said, “or mebbe a fox.”
He had grown into that habit of talking to himself, which is as common as human life itself in the far north, where one’s own voice is often the one thing that breaks a killing monotony. He edged his way to the window as he spoke and looked out with Kazan. Westward there stretched the lifeless Barren illimitable and void, without rock or bush and overhung by a sky that always made Pelliter think of a terrible picture he had once seen of Doré’s “Inferno.” It was a low, thick sky, like purple and blue granite, always threatening to pitch itself down in terrific avalanches, and between the earth and this sky was the thin, smothered world which MacVeigh had once called God’s insane asylum.
Through the gloom Kazan’s one eye and Pelliter’s feverish vision could not see far, but at last the man made out an object toiling slowly toward the cabin. At first he thought it was a fox, and then a wolf, and then, as it loomed larger, a straying caribou. Kazan whined. The bristles along his spine rose stiff and menacing. Pelliter stared harder and harder, with his face pressed close against the cold glass of the window, and suddenly he gave a gasping cry of excitement. It was a man who was toiling toward the cabin! He was bent almost double, and he staggered in a zigzag fashion as he advanced. Pelliter made his way feebly to the door, unbarred it, and pushed it partly open. Overcome by weakness he fell back then on the edge of his bunk,
It seemed an age before he heard steps. They were slow and stumbling, and an instant later a face appeared at the door. It was a terrible face, overgrown with beard, with wild and staring eyes; but it was a white man’s face. Pelliter had expected an Eskimo, and he sprang to his feet with sudden strength as the stranger came in.
“Something to eat, mate, for the love o’ God give me something to eat!”
The stranger fell in a heap on the floor and stared up at him with the ravenous entreaty of an animal. Pelliter’s first move was to get whisky, and the other drank it in great gulps. Then he dragged himself to his feet, and Pelliter sank in a chair beside the table.
“I’m sick,” he said. “Sergeant MacVeigh has gone to Churchill, and I guess I’m in a bad way. You’ll have to help yourself. There’s meat— ’n’ bannock—”
Whisky had revived the new-comer. He stared at Pelliter, and as he stared he grinned, ugly yellow teeth leering from between his matted beard. The look cleared Pelliter’s brain. For some reason which he could not explain, his pistol hand fell to the place where he usually carried his holster. Then he remembered that his service revolver was under the pillow.