But just because he was a man he didn't. She owed her sanctity to the fact that this rough son of Nature loved her with a love that seemed to rend his heart in twain. The thin canvas between them was as safe a partition as walls of granite. She might have found time to admire the quality of his love, considering the circumstances prevailing, but her pride left scant room for any sentiment of that sort. She merely took these things for granted. Jim, with the last hole bored in the iron earth, and the precious glint of gold still as absent as ever, gazed back at the tent with knitted brows. Red Ruin was a failure, as he had long known it to be. The future loomed dark and uncertain. There were no more creeks near Dawson worth the staking, but gold lay farther afield--over the vast repelling mountains. It would mean suffering, misery, for her. A winter in the Great Alone, harassed by blizzards, bitten by the intense cold, tracked by wolves and all the ferocious starved things of the foodless wilderness, was all he had to offer--that, and a burning love of which she seemed totally unconscious, or coldly indifferent. Why not let her go now? To see her suffer were but to multiply his own suffering a thousandfold, and yet she was his in the sight of God! He emitted a hard, guttural laugh as the mockery of the phrase was made clear to him. He collected the gear and, slinging it across his shoulders, mounted the hill. Overhead a long stream of birds was beating toward the South. He bade them a mute farewell, knowing that he would miss their silvern voices, and their morning wrangling among the spruce and hemlocks. "I guess life might be beautiful enough," he ruminated, "if one only had the things one wants, but the gittin' of 'em is sure hell!" He flung the pick and ax and washing-pan to the ground, and looked inside the tent. It was empty, and the cooking utensils were lying about as they were left at breakfast-time. Then he noticed that some of Angela's clothes were missing. The latter fact removed any lingering doubts from his mind. If any further evidence were required, it existed in the shape of a pile of cigar ash on the duckboarding. "So!" he muttered. He walked outside and stood gazing over the autumn-tinted country. A stray bird twitted among the trees, but the great silence was settling down every hour as the feathered immigrants mounted from copse and dell into the blue vault of heaven. "So!" he repeated, as though he were powerless to find any fuller expression of his emotions. He went back into the tent and slipped a revolver into his holster, then with huge strides went over the hill towards Dawson.