“I don’t mind the loneliness,” said Harrison.
“But I’ll be lonely.”
“Perhaps Coughlin wouldn’t want me, anyway. I haven’t done a stroke of work while I’ve been here.”
“But he’ll want you if I say so. I’m the best girl he’s got,” said Blanche, modestly, “and if I say so it goes. And I do say so.”
Harrison was silent. He had often thought of this. He had known, of course, that he could not live forever at the Comique. Many times he had decided that death were easier than a final parting from the dead. He had thought that he could never leave her, but now—— Well, the lust of life is strong. We do not know how far the fall is until we stand at the brink and look over. Besides there is no coming back. If we could only try it for a while and return again!
“Harrison,” said Blanche, suddenly, “listen. I think I know what you are thinking, and I know I can not argue such a thing with you. No one could. You know best, and no one else can know anything about it. But I want to tell you one fact that perhaps you haven’t thought of. You want to stay here with her—always. But you can’t. I know it is horrible to talk of, but it is not always winter even in Alaska, and the summer is almost here.” The man winced. “Go to bed, Harrison,” she said; “I can not talk of such things. You know best.”
He went away to the cabin. He knew that Blanche was right. It must be—but the anguish of it. How should he say the last farewell?
At the foot of the mountains that stretch upward from the Dyea sands, he dug a grave, four feet. And that night he would bury her. But his resolution failed him. All night he sat beside the unreplying dead and stroked her icy hands. “To-morrow I will do it,” he said. But the next day he dug again in the grave. It should be six feet. And neither could he say farewell that night.
Then Blanche came over to him. “We leave on Saturday. You know to-day is Wednesday,” she said, and went away quickly, for she saw the sheeted form, and understood something of his pain. On Thursday she came again. Harrison had not been at the restaurant all day, and she carried a tray with her. The cabin was empty, but a note on the table said: “I can not give her up. I could not hide her in a grave of earth. I will lay her on the mountain top above the glacier. Thank you. Good-by.”
Now the glacier lies in a greater crater of the mountains there, above the snow line, five thousand feet above Dyea; and behind it there towers a solitary peak that juts needle-like, head and shoulders over the lesser crags of the crater. Up above the world, far from the sound of man, into the great silence it reaches, where only the northern lights keep the long vigils with its wind-tormented top.