“And that,” she said, only to have assurance of his voice again, “that’s what the world is like up there?” “Do you think men go so far, and walk through hell, to bring home a lie?” Looking no longer at the orgy of color on the paper, but at the reflection of the actual scene in the dying face, “It was like the Day of Judgment,” said the girl. “You can see that!” The craftsman’s pleasure in his handiwork brought out a gleam, and then, with a sudden passion, he tore the paper across and across, while Hildegarde cried out: “Ah, don’t! Let me take it to—her!” “Take it to the fire!—and leave the great legacy unencumbered. Fire, fire!” He was gathering up the splinters and shavings that he had whittled from the skee in the hours before Hildegarde’s coming. “Here! Here!” A sense of impotency shackled her spirit as well as lamed her tongue. Blindly she took the fragments over to the embrasure of some blackened stones, just inside and to windward of the threshold. “No one is about?” “No one.” “This is to start it, then.” He held out something. “This will catch easiest.” “I have some thin paper here.” She twisted a wisp of her own map of the North, with a vague instinct of putting off an evil hour. But the sick man followed with eager eyes the laying of every crosswise stick, his gaunt frame huddled over his treasure while he watched the making of the sacrificial fire that should devour it. If his eyes left Hildegarde’s hands a moment, it was only that they might guard the door against surprise. Once again, “Look out,” he said, “and see—” “There’s no one. But wouldn’t you _like_ somebody to come in? Some face out of the past—” “To come _now_!” “Some one who could bring you news of—that girl you—” “Remember wood’s worth more than gold up here! Keep a little back.” “Keep some back?” “Paper like this burns slow. As you say some one might interrupt—” No hospitality in the look he sent to the door. “Before you light it, have everything over there, ready to feed the fire.” His thin arms gathered up the store. Ky growled uneasily as Hildegarde drew near, the girl wondering what was best for Galbraith’s peace, what was of any avail. He made a motion to give her all he held, but what he actually handed over was the torn crayon, and even in the act of giving up that he set one fragment against another, looking his last. “Oh, keep it—let me keep it—for her. Could you bear to hear—” But that mysterious arctic current, about which the greatest geographers are not agreed, it had carried him back again to the Pole! With vacant eyes on the colored paper, “We left him a feather for his ice-cap, didn’t we, Ky?” “A feather.” “Or a ribbon. Didn’t you see?” “See—?” “This. You didn’t notice we planted the stars and stripes there?” “Oh-h. You see I thought you said no one was ever to know—” “—and I carved a B. on the flagstaff. It was Borisoff’s snow-shoe staff. But the B.—it didn’t stand for Borisoff.” “No?”