“I hate to leave you alone, Pelly,” he said. “But I’ll make a fast trip of it— four hundred and fifty miles over the ice, and I’ll do it in ten days or bust. Then ten days back, mebbe two weeks, and you’ll have the medicines and the letters. Hurrah!”
“Hurrah!” cried Pelliter.
He turned his face a little to the wall. Something rose up in MacVeigh’s throat and choked him as he gripped Pelliter’s hand.
“My God, Bill, is that the sun?” suddenly cried Pelliter.
MacVeigh wheeled toward the one window of the cabin. The sick man tumbled from his bunk. Together they stood for a moment at the window, staring far to the south and east, where a faint red rim of gold shot up through the leaden sky.
“It’s the sun,” said MacVeigh, like one speaking a prayer.
“The first in four months,” breathed Pelliter.
Like starving men the two gazed through the window. The golden light lingered for a few moments, then died away. Pelliter went back to his bunk.
Half an hour later four dogs, a sledge, and a man were moving swiftly through the dead and silent gloom of Arctic day. Sergeant MacVeigh was on his way to Fort Churchill, more than four hundred miles away.
This is the loneliest journey in the world, the trip down from the solitary little wind-beaten cabin at Point Fullerton to Fort Churchill. That cabin has but one rival in the whole of the Northland— the other cabin at Herschel Island, at the mouth of the Firth, where twenty-one wooden crosses mark twenty-one white men’s graves. But whalers come to Herschel. Unless by accident, or to break the laws, they never come in the neighborhood of Fullerton. It is at Fullerton that men die of the most terrible thing in the world— loneliness. In the little cabin men have gone mad.