M. W. and Albert Kinross

“ The guide is my stumbling-block—it would take a good deal of inducement to prevail upon a guide like Lajimonière to drop out of sight and give up his profession.”
“Oh, sentiment may have entered into it as well as money—as it does with you.”
“You may sneer, Harmon, but in a country like this, where we're all little men fighting with our naked hands this great white foe, where every man's life is in his brother's keeping, sentiment means more than gold. Men have frozen solid clutching Klondike nuggets in their pockets. We give our lives; in the cities men only sell them. ”

“ Nobody spoke until Semple said, “If you'll pardon me, I'll turn in now. It's the rule, you know, when you're mushing twenty miles a day. You keep the sun's hours—that is, the sun's hours in the blessed countries where they have a sun.”
“Would you mind,” Leona Harmon said, when Semple had left them for the night, “if we went outside to talk instead of talking here?”
A little way down the slope from the cabin door was a boulder which the action of the rains and the frosts and the snows had laboured through centuries to hollow into seats. ”

“ The shade of the departed may hang round the fatal spot waiting to say its say; but he can't expect any living man to haunt the same place for a round dozen years. Why, even if he were alive—and it's a thousand to one he isn't—he'd be likely to choose some more luxurious climate than the great North-West—it's a rare taste, Semple, with the gold chucked in ”

“ There were some who didn't accept the fact of Malmain's death, and held that it happened with him as it's happened with other men—that he just went off to the back of beyond and dropped out, and that's the long and the short of it. There were one or two men in the party who believed that he always intended to leave it and cover his trail.”
Harmon had listened in silence. “Well, if a man wants to trek out and lose his trail,” he now moralised, “he's a right to, provided he hasn't committed a crime, and the body social doesn't consider he owes it his life as forfeit. ”

“ You look as if you hadn't left camp far behind.”
“I haven't,” he answered, as he threw himself from his horse and shook hands with her; “I left it about nine miles down the river. The fact is, I'm not alone; I've a friend and a guide with me. I've ridden on ahead to present our visiting cards, so to speak. I didn't like to take you unawares.”
“How ceremonious we're getting in the wilderness!” she said, with a touch of lightest irony. “Visiting cards are of use only where people may wish to excuse themselves. ”

“ Leona Harmon interposed, speaking almost for the first time—“you don't know the harm you may be doing somebody else. You're trying to help this young man find his father, and that's very commendable in you. In you and in him. I understand he's lonely now; youth often is lonely. But he may marry soon—his life will fill up. While the older man, Lord Malmain—if he were to go- back now he would find everything strange and changed. ”

“ It's his choice; he has a right to make it—what the devil business is it of yours? Tell your Malmain boy to go back where he came from and find himself some other sport—that's what I say.”
“I've told you where I come in, Harmon. As for Malcolm Malmain, a man doesn't cross the ocean and travel a thousand miles to be told he'd better have stayed where he was. Its rather late for that. Besides, doesn't it occur to you that a son has some rights—added to his natural interest in his father's existence?” ”

“ I'll stay here now, and we'll go down first thing to-morrow morning and bring 'em back with us.”
It was not till after supper, when the shortening twilight had begun to settle down, that Semple touched upon the object of his visit. He and his host sat smoking before the fire in the living-room of Harmon's four-roomed shack—a long, low room with a wide-throated chimney, skins of fox and bear upon the floor, other pelts covering the walls, everywhere warmth and the material of warmth.
“What's this expedition you want me to join, Gordon? you're too early for moose,” Harmon had just asked. ”

“ An aurora, paler, more delicate than those of winter, with the hues of wood violets and anemones and alpine rose upon its tremulous wings—a spirit of springs that had died young in this unvernal land, immortalised in its skies, hung over their heads. ”

“ When, in winter, over the white silence of the earth violent skies beat with the pulse of passion and throbbed with a thousand throes, night after night she warmed herself at those vital and tingling heavens. ”

“ Semple has only told us a story about a man who disappeared. To-morrow he'll join his friend, and they will continue their journey and go after moose. There's an end of it—it makes no difference at all. ”

“ As yet, in these last days of August, he only touched men lightly, in warning; a month from now the summer's truce would be ended, and the north wind be an enemy outright, with whom men grappled to the death. ”

“ A WOMAN sat on a rock that jutted from the slope of the foothills that rise—bare in places, and in others sparsely clothed with ragged spruce and birch—above the banks of the Yukon River. Not more than two hundred miles to the north of her the Arctic Circle cut that land of surface sponge and ice and iron underneath with its imaginary radius. ”

“ If some poor wretch has managed to get away and cut his life by the pattern he made himself, and be happy in doing it, why the hell must you and the rest of the world he's chosen to die to, get to baying on his track and hound him back again? ”

“ I'm only helping a wise child to know its own father. You've heard of Skeene's expedition that started out from Skagway about a dozen years ago, haven't you? Skookum Bill, a half-breed Indian, had shown Skeene some gold he found in the bed of a creek that flows into Mackenzie River, and Skeene fitted out an expedition for exploring and prospecting up in that country. In his party was an Englishman who had just come over—Lord Malmain. After they had been out four or five weeks he and Skeene quarrelled, and Malmain left the party, taking only a guide with him. ”

“ There would remain no place where the forest things could hide; no place where men and women who had been hurt and shamed among their fellows could escape reminder; where they could shed their pasts as a garment and go forth naked into the forests to be clothed again with gradual forgetfulness and peace. ”

“ Leona Harmon said, looking up from her knitting.
“It's his son I'm with—young Lord Malmain.”
“What made him wait so long?” she asked again,
“When his father went away, Malcolm Malmain was a little chap getting ready for Eton. I've worked out that part of the story to suit myself as well, though young Malmain has supplied a good many links. Lying out these nights that we've been travelling together, round the camp-fire under the stars, men get to be pretty intimate. Though Malmain has had a good many reticences, they've taught me more than what he said. ”

“ A dead man's pretty dead in twelve years.”.
“If he is dead,” Semple reminded him. “We may leave the wife out, I think. I've an idea—and it's purely my own idea, you understand—that the wife was chiefly responsible for Malmain's disappearance. At any rate, she didn't prolong the agony. She promptly became a widow and married as soon as decency would let her. The fact is, it looks rather as though Malmain's successor had been there ready all the time. ”

“ No milksop—only he'd like to have his father buried in the family vault if he's dead, and make sure if he isn't. Natural enough, it seems to me. Two years ago he got hold of Skeene's book giving the history of the expedition, in which he blames himself sharply for the quarrel, acknowledges that he spoke to Malmain in a way he had no right to, but says that he can't understand Malmain's total disappearance, for he had the best guide in the whole North-West, and it was June of a remarkably open summer—no blizzards, no storms.”
“There are a hundred ways in which a man may die out here ”