Late one afternoon he went out alone and stood on the cliff watching the thunderous movement of arctic ice out in the Roes Welcome. Standing motionless fifty paces from the little storm-beaten cabin that represented Law at this loneliest outpost on the American continent, he looked like a carven thing of dun-gray rock, with a dun-gray world over his head and on all sides of him, broken only in its terrific monotony of deathlike sameness by the darker gloom of the sky and the whiter and ghostlier gloom that hung over the ice-fields. The wind was still bitter, and his vision was shut in by a near horizon which Billy had often thought of as the rim of hell. On this afternoon his heart was as leaden as the day. Under his feet the frozen earth shivered with the rumbling reverberations of the crashing and breaking mountains of ice. His ears were filled with a dull and steady roar, like the echoes of distant thunder, broken now and then-- when an ice-mountain split asunder-- with a report like that of a thirteen-inch gun. There were curious wailings, strange screeching sounds, and heartbreaking moanings in the air. Two days before MacVeigh had heard the roar of the ice ten miles inland, where he had gone for caribou. But he scarcely heard that roar now. He was looking toward the warring fields of ice, but he did not see them. It was not the dead gloom and the gray monotony that weighted his heart, but the sounds that he heard now and then in the cabin-- the laughing of Little Mystery and of Pelliter. A few days more and he would lose them. And after that what would be left for him? A cry broke from his lips, and he gripped his hands in despair. He would be alone. There was no one waiting for him down in that world to which Pelliter was going, no girl to meet him, no father, no mother-- nothing. He laughed in his pain as he faced the cold wind from the north. The sting of that wind was like the mocking ghost of his own past life. For all his life he had known only the stings of pain and of loneliness. And then, suddenly, there came Pelliter's words to him again-- "Mebbe some day you'll have a kid." A flood of warmth swept through his veins, and in the moment of forgetfulness and hope which came with it he turned his eyes into the south and west and saw the sweet face and upturned lips of Isobel Deane.