"Good God!" he exclaimed, "I haven't got it; I must have dropped it coming up here, or they stole it in that hell down town."
Stephen feebly put up his hand.
"Don't trouble, I don't want it. I am just going to lie here and wait with her. Was she not lovely?" he muttered to himself, raising himself on his knees and laying the body before him on the snow.
The sky above them arched in pitchy blackness, but the starlight was so keen and brilliant that it lighted up the white silence round them. Stephen, on his hands and knees, hung over the still figure and gazed down into the marble face. The short silky black hair made a little blot of darkness in the snow, the white face was turned upward to the starlight. Talbot, looking down, caught for an instant the sight of its pure oval, its regular lines, and the sweet mouth, and the passionate, reasonless face of the man crouching over it, and then looked desperately up and down the narrow lonely trail. They were five miles from the town, a little over three from the cabins. Glistening whiteness lay all around, till the plains of snow grew grey in the distance; overhead, the burning, flashing, restless stars; and far off, where the two planets guarded the horizon, the red lights of the north began to quiver and flicker in the night.
The man on the ground noticed them, and straightening himself suddenly, looked towards them.
"The flare of hell!" he muttered, with staring, straining eyes; "it's coming very near."
Talbot saw that his reason had gone, failed suddenly, as a light goes down under a blast; he was delirious with that sudden delirium born of the awful cold that seizes men like a wolf in the long night of the Arctic winters.
For a second the helplessness of his situation flashed in upon Talbot's brain—alone here at midnight on the frozen trail, with a madman and a corpse!
He saw he must get help at once, and the cabins were the nearest point where help could be found. He could get men who would carry Stephen by force if necessary, but would he ever live in the fangs of this pitiless cold till they could return to him? He stood for one moment irresolute, unwilling to leave him to meet his death, and that horrible fear that he read in those haggard eyes watching the horizon, alone; and in that moment Stephen looked up at him and met his eye, and the madness rolled back and stood off his brain for an instant. He beckoned to Talbot, and Talbot went down on his knees beside him on the snow.
"My claims," muttered Stephen; "those claims will be yours now, do you understand? I've arranged it all with that lawyer Hoskins, down town. They were to be hers if anything happened to me, but we shall both go to-night, and they will be yours. She said I had sunk my soul in them, Talbot; she was right. The gold got me, I neglected her; I let her slip back into evil; I've murdered her for the claims. They are the price hell paid me. But you keep them. All turns to good in your hands. They can't harm you. Keep them. They are my grave."