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That cry out there — in the nowhere — it got me — under my skin
about him, in the little ways. He hadn't made good — of course. It was the booze, with him. It may have been something more. I think it was ... a woman. Only a woman can knife a man like he'd been knifed. The booze can rot a man — but Marston's hurt went deeper than that. Yes, I'm sure it was a woman. A girl, I guess. You know . . . a girl . *•-; . like the girls at home . . . on Fifth Avenue ... in May . . .sunshine all glearny on their hair . . . violets . . . and late tea . . . and all that ... It was that sort of a girl with Burke Marston. And she had sent him to hell. Funny . . . but . . . well, 'good women,' you know . . . crueller than death . . . colder than ice . . . harder
!
Mears wasn't afraid of him. He raised his gun, the girl screamed
than . . . well, anyway, we ran across each other up there beyond the Circle. Mushed the same trails, did up the same dance-halls, burned with the same fever. All the time he had in his eyes the look of a wounded caribou ... a big thing, wounded and helpless. In one of the mushroom overnights we came on Mears. I didn't like him. Marston said he was all right. Marston said everything and everybody were 'all right.' The three of us mushed the trail to the cabin we decided to inhabit. God Himself couldn't 'a' found that trail. But the Girl did. She did. God ! but women are uncanny things — sometimes. Seem to have a sense past any sense a sane man ever heard of. But I'm getting ahead of my story.
"Once we were all nice and settled, grub in, bacon, flour, gunnies of tea, trouble started up 'tween Mears and Marston. Mears suspected Marston of havin' a cache of brandy. Marston had. I knew it, and kept mum. Knew he needed it where Mears didn't. Knew it had laid its claw on Marston and would strangle him if he were left stranded without it — 'specially when the long, Arctic night set in, and memory set in, too, colder than the blizzard land, more despairful than the silences when even a wolf how! would have been joyful. It is a grim thing — that Arctic night.
"We didn't know then what Mears was doing up there. Men dont come there for nothing. But we began to suspect that he was there because he damn well couldn't be anywhere else. We didn't say anything about it, the one to the other . . . pals are few and far between up there . . . but we watched him . . . and kept on watching him . . .
"There was the time when old Pat Gerry . . . this. will serve to tell you about Mears . . .Pat J was a derelict of the Yukon . . . an old-timer. It had taken its toll of Pat . . . the North. There wasn't much left. A broken old brain, a broken old body, the instincts of a sly child, a
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