Ah, yes, Joyce had missed Lloyd. But now he was back. They were all back. Lloyd’s steam-thawer had been going for three days. What success had come to him? Would there be gold on that ancient river bed?
She was thinking of all this as she stood bare-headed in the starlight on a glorious Arctic night. Then the night claimed her. The moon was not up. But the stars! Every one of them seemed a spark of fire fallen upon a curtain of midnight blue velvet.
“They burn, but they do not consume,” she thought, as she moved slowly up the hill toward the place where the white foxes played. “Stars are like our love for our fellow men and God. They light the world, but do not destroy.”
She had come close to her watching place at the back of a cluster of scrub spruce trees, when a voice close beside her drawled:
“What are you all doing up here by your lonesome?”
It was Jim, the Kentucky mountain boy. Her first impulse was one of anger. Why should he intrude upon her privacy? This lasted but for a space of seconds. The night, the stars, the yellow lights from the cabins below, together with Jim’s appealing southern drawl, changed her impatience.
The rebuke that came to her lips remained unuttered. Instead, she held up a hand for silence, then pointed toward the clump of trees. Then together they crept forward.
“There! There they are!” she whispered low.
“Foxes!” he whispered back. “Cunnin’ little critters!”
After that for ten minutes, with the golden firmament swinging overhead and the foxes frisking in the starlight, they watched in silence.