vital, forelooking, despite the pain in them. He was dreamer still; dreaming mightily, as he had once dreamed with Dick in those long-past mornings of life, that the other man would not think of now. But sudden memory of them roughened Dick's easy manner a little as he fitted his breast to the strap that clipped him from shoulder to arm-pit, even as, two yards further along the thin tow-line, a similar strap clipped Moonias.
When the two men had first fallen apart at the touch of the yellow-haired girl, a desperation of pain had driven Dick into more evil than the straight clean work of these latter days would wipe out of his face again. Then he sickened of it; sickened of what the town-cradled men and women could give him. And then, because he had denied all law and all gods in his madness of soul, he chose to fit the yoke of the Law to his neck, and to take his oath to it in the name of God. And after that he did his penance daily.
For the Wild was the only mistress who could ever hold Dick's soul for long, and the Wild had whistled him back to her so many times of late. Whistled him back in the long, far, sharp-smelling sedges where the wild duck fly south in thin, black, broken lines, and the red sun sets alone in the silence; whistled him back where Lake Athabaska and the Great Slave roll their stately deep-sea harmonies below horizon; where the rivers brawl, driving their jetsam north to meet the ice; where the snow-tang savours the air with its promise, and the caribou lift their heads, winding man, and the keen wolf-cry drifts over the stilling land.
To-day that haunting, heart-pulling whistle was silent. To-day, when he leaned in the traces as canal-horses lean, side-stepping the rough track irregularly, with the humped shoulders of Moonias before him. All the sun of these last breathless fall days was cast down into the thin gut of the river. The far sky was sick-white with heat. The coulées were brimful of it. Along the mighty web of water-veins that bring blood to Canada's heart it reeled in giddy mirage, and it danced in the clearings like a thing alive. The smell of heat was abroad on the earth; sharp, clean and resinous in the tang of spruce and jack-pine;
