Page:Weird Tales v01n02 (1923-04).djvu/156

Rh crept through the cabin. Winter had come.

At dawn it was still storming. For three days the blizzard kept up. I huddled in my robes, fed the fire from the diminishing pile of wood, ate sparingly of the scanty food. And again the fear began to play upon my heart with chill fingers; again I strove to banish it with grim resolve.

On the fourth day the snow ceased, but the wind remained unabated. It grew terribly cold. And on that day my woodpile dwindled to nothing, my last scrap of food vanished.

It grew colder. I kept the fire burning charily, feeding it, bit by bit, the scanty furniture that Norton had made with axe and hammer. I husbanded every bit, crouching over the merest spark of a flame, wrapping my thin body in robe and fur to conserve the precious warmth.

And still the storm raved around the cabin. Still the screaming wind drove the snowflakes against the windows, through badly-chinked crevices—a malicious, devilish wind, that seemed, to my disordered brain, to be an embodied spirit of evil bent on my destruction. And still the cold penetrated, mocking my efforts to stave it off.

Hunger and cold and pain combined to sap my strength. I grew delirious. For hours I forgot where I was, lived again the hours I had spent with Jane, saw her as I remembered her, a slim, exquisite thing, dark of hair, luminous of face, a spirit thing, too fine for man's possession. And again I pressed her in my arms, and swore that I would return.

Waking from such visions, the will to live burned very strong in me. I would live; I would return. I swore it. Death could not conquer me: could not conquer love. Yet all the time I grew weaker; the flame of life flickered lower in my emaciated body.

The body was dying. I knew it. It scarce had strength now to cast more wood on the dying fire. Within it the pulse of existence flickered feebly. But never was the real me more alive. I burned fiercely with the desire to live. I swore I should not die.

Then one morning I awoke. The fire was out. Yet I was not cold. I attempted to rise; my body did not answer. I attempted to speak; no words came. Then I knew.

In the night the body had died. It lay there now, stiff, still. It had ceased to live.

But I was not dead. I could see my body lying there, a cast-off thing. But I was here.

The entity that was I had not perished with the flesh. The will to live was still mine. And I was alive! I was infinitely alive.

My perceptions were a hundred times clearer. I saw, I heard, I felt, as I never had before. And it seemed as if my whole being were concentrated in the one desire—to see Jane, to tell her I still lived.

And then there shot through my brain a terrible, sickening thought. To all the world's knowledge I was dead. I was no longer flesh, but spirit. I could see Jane, no doubt, but I could never make myself known to her. I had lost her.

HE most exquisite torture of soul racked me as the realization came. I was not dead. There was no death; my will had conquered it. But I was hopelessly and forever exiled from the world I had known. That warm familiar world that held love and so many other things, was forever taken away from me.

Hopelessly exiled! Again my will revolted at the thought. Why was I forever condemned to such exile? There lay the body. It had ceased to live, in truth. I had shed it as one does a garment. But why could I not don it again?

The body had stopped because of external, physical reasons. The soul had fled because living soul could not inhabit dead flesh. But if the phys-