“We were sent on detachment duty up to a place called Bear Rock. Jim knows where it is, and as you don’t, the best way I can describe it to you is to say that a one-horse board-and-canvas town anywhere in the wilds you’ve a mind to place it, would have been a metropolis alongside of it.
“There were a few Cree Indians around—I forgot to say it was up in the Yukon Country—and that was all the society we had. Not even skin thieves or horse rustlers ever came up there. It was too poor pickin’s even for them.
“Things began to go wrong the first winter. I saw that the loneliness of it all was beginning to prey on young Nevins’ nerves. I call him young, but I expect he was older than he looked. Mind you, he never said anything in the way of complaint, but I’d seen men go that way before, and I saw that he was not built for the job. I tried to get him to go back to division headquarters and report sick, or ask to be transferred or something. But he was a proud cuss, and ‘No,’ says he, ‘I’ll stick it out.’
“Well, if you’ve never been stuck off in the Yukon, sixty miles from any place, with a man whom you suspect is beginning to get snow madness, you’ve no idea what a business it is. Nevins had a nice little habit of getting up in the middle of the night and saying that he saw faces looking at him through the window, and voices calling down the chimney, and little things like that.
“By the middle of the second winter he got so bad that it began to get on my nerves, too, and I’d begun to look about and listen and think I heard things. I soon saw that this wouldn’t do, and so decided to ride into White Lake, the nearest station, and explain matters. Besides, Nevins was really in need of a doctor. His face was drawn and pale and he could hardly be trusted out by himself on the trail, for he was always shooting at something or other that he thought he saw, but which wasn’t there at all. Oh, he was a bad case, I tell you. I began to be scared that some night he might take a fancy to get up and shoot at me. I began to lose sleep and get pretty nearly as peaked as he was.
“When I broke the news to him that we were going back to the station he got mad as a hornet. He was no kid, he said. He could stick it out. All he wanted was to shoot the enemies that were after him, and then he’d be all right. I quieted him down by telling him that our time at the post was up anyhow, and that we were due to report back at White Lake without delay.
“As soon as he saw, as he thought, that we were not leaving on his account he brightened up wonderfully. He took an interest in getting the shack in order for the next comers and talked about our trip almost all night. I patted myself on the back. He seemed like a cured man already, and when we started out with our parkees on our backs and our snow shoes on our feet, you’d have thought that there wasn’t a thing the matter with him.
“Sometimes there was a queer glitter in his eyes, though, that showed me that he wasn’t as right as he seemed to be by any means, and that a doctor and some companionship were needed before a thorough cure could be effected. As we left the shack he turned and shook his fist at it without saying a word, but his face showed me how much he had suffered there and how glad he was to be saying good-by to it all.
“Mushing, as they call traveling in the Yukon, is slow work on a broken trail, and that one from the shack to White Lake was about as bad a specimen as I ever traveled over. But Nevins didn’t seem to mind it. He was so eager to get back to civilization—as if you could call White Lake civilization—that he was always ahead of me. But I didn’t like his gait. It was awkward, zig-zaggy, not the trail of a man who is sure of himself. Nevins was living on his nerves. I caught myself praying they didn’t explode before we reached White Lake!
“Once I offered to take a turn at breaking the trail. But, ‘No, what do you think I am? A baby?’ says he angrily, and after that we plugged along in silence. Nevins’ head was poked forward and he appeared to be in a desperate hurry to get along, almost as if he was afraid something was after him.