In like manner, never did I have a moment's time to regard my inner self in the mirror of consciousness. No mental analysis now; no long hours of retrospection, no tête-à-tête interviews with my soul. At times I felt as if I had lost my identity. I was a slave of the genie Gold, releasing it from its prison in the frozen bowels of the earth. I was an automaton turning a crank in the frozen stillness of the long, long night.
It was a life despotically objective, and now, as I look back, it seems as if I had never lived it at all. I seem to look down a long, dark funnel and see a little machine-man bearing my semblance, patiently, steadily, wearily turning the handle of a windlass in the clear, lancinating cold of those sombre, silent days.
I say "bearing my outward semblance," and yet I sometimes wonder if that rough-bearded figure in heavy woollen clothes looked the least like me. I wore heavy sweaters, mackinaw trousers, thick German socks and moccasins. From frequent freezing my cheeks were corroded. I was miserably thin, and my eyes had a wild, staring expression through the pupils dilating in the long darkness. Yes, mentally and physically I was no more like myself than a convict enduring out his life in the soulless routine of a prison.
The days were lengthening marvellously. We noted the fact with dull joy. It meant more light, more time, more dirt in the dump. So it came about that, from ten hours of toil, we went to twelve, to fourteen; then, latterly, to sixteen, and the tension of it was wearing us down to skin and bone.
We were all feeling wretched, overstrained, ill-nourished, and it was only voicing the general sentiment when, one day, the Prodigal remarked:
"I guess I'll have to let up for a couple of days. My teeth are all on the bum. I'm going to town to see a dentist."
"Let me look at them," said the Halfbreed.
He looked. The gums were sullen, unwholesome-looking.
"Why, it's a touch of scurvy, lad; a little while, and you'd be spitting out your teeth like orange pips; your legs would turn black, and when you squeezed your fingers into the flesh the hole would stay. You'd get rotten, then you'd mortify and die. But it's the easiest thing in the world to cure. Nothing responds to treatment so readily."
He made a huge brew of green-spruce tea, of which we all partook, and in a few days the Prodigal was fit again.