I was strong once more. I ran round to the back of the cabin. She was in there, I knew. I rushed at the window and threw myself against it. The storm frame had not been taken off. Crash! I burst through both sheets of glass. I was cruelly cut, bleeding in a dozen places, yet I was half into the room. There, in the dirty, drab light, I saw a face, the fiendish, rage-distorted face of my dream. It was Locasto.

He turned at the crash. With a curse he came at me. Then, as I hung half in, half out of the window, he clutched me by the throat. Using all his strength, he raised me further into the room, then he hurled me ruthlessly out onto the rocks outside.

I rose, reeling, covered with blood, blind, sick, speechless. Weakly I staggered to the window. My strength was leaving me. "O God, sustain me! Help me to save her."

Then I felt the world go blank. I swayed; I clutched at the walls; I fell.

There I lay in a ghastly, unconscious heap.

I had lost!


BOOK IV

THE VORTEX

He burned a hole in the frozen muck;
He scratched the icy mould;
And there in six-foot dirt he struck
A sack or so of gold.
He burned a hole in the Decalogue,
And then it came about—
For Fortune's only a lousy rogue—
His "pocket" petered out.
And lo! it was but a year all told,
When there in the shadow grim,
But six feet deep in the icy mould,
They burned a hole for him.
—"The Yukoner."