Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 69).djvu/159

 no oil for cooking the mouldy seal-meat. Only the medicine-man had oil now.

The dogs outside had quieted and the voice of Ah-king-ah's drum alone rode the gale. The little missionary, squatting over the lamp, kept turning his thin, expectant face toward the outside door. He was always looking for it to open, but it never had. Fifteen minutes dragged by before he rose and rang the second bell.

Across the vapour of his breath the rows of clean new benches reproached him with their emptiness, and from the bare wooden walls frost-pegs on every nail-head pointed at him like accusing white fingers. He turned slowly and, mounting the pulpit, stood, his hands on the open Bible, his blue eyes looking down wistfully on the cheerless room. The smoky bracket lamp behind him threw his shadow, long and grotesque, across the bare benches as if in pity trying to cover them. The sound of the devil-drum filtered in faint, taunting, but the missionary cleared his throat and, as was his wont, began his lonely Sunday service. His voice, forlorn and strange at first, grew firmer as he proceeded. By and by it quite shut out the insolence of the devil-drum.

At the end he closed his Bible and turned out the light. There was a dispirited sag to his narrow shoulders as he went back to his living-room. To-day, because death was so near to them all, the Eskimos' animal-like indifference to himself and his message made him feel small and forsaken—made him ache with the terrible longing of a lonely white man for his kind. For a moment he stood uncertain, his breath clouding the cold, stale atmosphere of the igloo; then, with the air of one banishing personal weaknesses, he shoved his parka hood over his head, drew the long fur about his face, and made his way out through the snow tunnel leading from his door to the open.

The pallor of the Arctic noon was filled with frost-dust borne on wind of such velocity that its passing was like the whiz of speeding bullets. Through the fur about his face the man peered at the ice-pack