Probably it would be impossible for even the girl ever fully
to understand. And he needed to be alone to gather strength and mental
calmness for the meeting of the problem ahead of him, a complication so
unexpected that the very foundation of that stoic equanimity which the
mountains had bred in him had suffered a temporary upsetting. His
happiness was almost an insanity. The dream wherein he had wandered with
a spirit of the dead had come true; it was the old idyl in the flesh
again, his father, his mother--and back in the cabin beyond the ridge
such a love had cried out to him. And he was afraid to return. He
laughed the fact aloud, happily and with an unrepressed exultation as
he strode ahead of the pack-train, and with that exultation words came
to his lips, words intended for himself alone, telling him that Mary
Standish belonged to him, and that until the end of eternity he would
fight for her and keep her. Yet he kept on, facing the mountains, and he
walked so swiftly that Tautuk and Amuk Toolik fell steadily behind with
the deer, so that in time long dips and swells of the tundra lay
between them.
With grim persistence he kept at himself, and at last there swept over
him in its ultimate triumph a compelling sense of the justice of what he
had done--justice to Mary Standish.
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