“Yes, Kob?”
“Garry! . . . . My God! . . . . You don’t mean—”
“I’m a’most blind, Kob. It’s the sun and the new snow. I can make shift to see my feet—in a kind of red mist. No more. Is the hill there, Kob?”
The silence took them again, broken now by Kob, who screamed out like a woman.
“Oh God, oh God, we’re done! You blind, and me sick! We’ll die here. You’ll never get me to Fort Scarlett! Oh, why didn’t I stay at the shack, and die there?”
When he had done, Garry spoke, gently, almost gaily. Kob could not see the grey granite of his face.
“I passed you my word I’d get you to Fort Scarlett, Kob. You ain’t found me break my word yet. I’ll get you there. I ain’t quite blind. No more’n a horse in blinkers. You’ll have to be driver, Kob, and tell me where to go.”
To all Kob’s cries and curses, to all the wild utterances of a sick man’s despair, he answered the same thing:
“I’ll get you to Fort Scarlett, Kob, if you tell me where to go.”
Noon, and a vast sun showing momentarily through the fleeing rack: found them going forward slowly, but steadily, Kob sitting erect in the sledge and shouting to the blinded Garry as a man shouts to his dog-team. Once and again Garry stopped, to feel Kob’s flesh with his own bare hands, in fear of frostbite, to feed him, to wrap him more closely in the soft seal fur. He was fighting every foot of the way. Kob watched him, fear in his hollowed eyes; later, more than fear. He whispered: