Page:They who walk in the wilds, (IA theywhowalkinwil00robe).pdf/185

 lonely refuge, he suddenly set up a rollicking song. But this would presently come to seem as if it were stirring some slow, vast, implacable resentment in the heart of the terrible solitude; and he would stop abruptly, feeling as if he ought to apologize, and stir his little fire to a livelier blaze. The fire—it was his one friend; and they two were alone together in an infinite loneliness.

And so the long night wore itself away.

With the first of dawn McLaggan sprang up, shook himself, and tightened his belt. He drank some more of his insipid—but at least hot—birch tea. Then piling the last of the wood on the fire, he proceeded to warm himself systematically through and through. But he had to acknowledge to himself, ruefully, that though food could give warmth, warmth was a poor substitute for breakfast. A few minutes later he was under way, and heading, not back toward camp, but, in his obstinacy, for the settlement.

During the night, in thinking over the lay of the land, he had decided just where he had gone wrong. For about an hour he followed his trail of the preceding afternoon. By this time he had reached a space of broken ground, covered with rounded humps, which his old trail skirted on the left. He had taken these humps for thick clumps of bush buried in snow. He now realized that they were a colony of scattered boulders. He re-