passable mountains permitted it. But day by day he grew to know that want of food was going to call the time before the east he looked for was won. Through the days that swelled to a week, to a fortnight, he took no notice of Andree. His own bitter anger and despair blackened the world for him beyond all pity and mercy.
Other men had disgraced the uniform they wore. Other men had been privately branded among their fellows. Dick had had no pity for them. Now men would have no pity for him. Whether his body were found or not, he would be recognised as a traitor and a deserter. He had no business off the Mackenzie route, and no man could get lost on the Mackenzie. If he had left that trail he had left it for some ill-doing, and all men would know it. All men would be ready to blacken his name—the name of the brilliant lone-patrol man who had thrown away his honour and the honour of the Force for an Indian girl. All men would know. And they would laugh. Andree, plodding silent behind him, wondered vaguely at his look and tone when he had to speak to her. But it was not until the night when he killed the first dog that she broke down.
"Dick," she cried. "Dick. I make sorry. Oh—I sorry. Dick—love me."
He turned from the kettle where he boiled the meat. The dogs slunk round him, licking their lips after their unholy meal, and he looked gaunt and cruel and lean as they.
"You have no need to be sorry," he said. "You may find it an easier death than the other. And you have revenged yourself on me."
"But I do not understand. Oh, Dick, be kind to me or I will make die."
"You surely understand that we are both going to die in any case. It can make no difference whether I am kind to you or not."
He brought her the food, and she took it in silence. She was afraid of him, but not of anything else. Life had come to mean to her nothing but a stumbling on behind that swinging figure as it had come to mean to Dick nothing but a horror of the disgraced name which he must leave behind him. The wind beat her, or the sun dazzled,
