A very sensitive man in some ways
was McDowell! At the end of the first hour Keith stood up in the middle
of the floor, and with his arms resting on the table and his shoulders
sagging Conniston put him through the drill. After that he gave Keith
his worn Service Manual and commanded him to study while he rested.
Keith helped him to his bunk, and for a time after that tried to read
the Service book. But his eyes blurred, and his brain refused to obey.
The agony in the Englishman's low breathing oppressed him with a
physical pain. Keith felt himself choking and rose at last from the
table and went out into the gray, ghostly twilight of the night.
His lungs drank in the ice-tanged air. But it was not cold.
Kwaske-hoo--the change--had come. The air was filled with the tumult of
the last fight of winter against the invasion of spring, and the forces
of winter were crumbling. The earth under Keith's feet trembled in the
mighty throes of their dissolution. He could hear more clearly the roar
and snarl and rending thunder of the great fields of ice as they swept
down with the arctic current into Hudson's Bay. Over him hovered a
strange night. It was not black but a weird and wraith-like gray, and
out of this sepulchral chaos came strange sounds and the moaning of a
wind high up.
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