The sky was cloudless, and the stars
were like glaring, yellow eyes peering through holes in a vast,
overhanging curtain of jet black. Keith, out to fill his lungs with
air, looked up at the phenomenon of the polar night and shuddered. The
stars were like living things, and they were looking at him. Under
their sinister glow the foxes were holding high carnival. It seemed to
Keith that they had drawn a closer circle about the cabin and that
there was a different note in their yapping now, a note that was more
persistent, more horrible. Conniston had foreseen that closing-in of
the little white beasts of the night, and Keith, reentering the cabin,
set about the fulfillment of his promise. Ghostly dawn found his task
completed.
Half an hour later he stood in the edge of the scrub timber that rimmed
in the arctic plain, and looked for the last time upon the little cabin
under the floor of which the Englishman was buried. It stood there
splendidly unafraid in its terrible loneliness, a proud monument to a
dead man's courage and a dead man's soul. Within its four walls it
treasured a thing which gave to it at last a reason for being, a reason
for fighting against dissolution as long as one log could hold upon
another.
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