The other example is of a man known to every fur buyer of St. Louis and Chicago and St. Paul--Mr. Hall, the chief commissioner of furs for the Hudson's Bay Company. I wish I could give it in Mr. Hall's own words--in the slow quiet recital of the man who has spent his life amid the great silent verities, up next to primordial facts, not theorizing and professionalizing and discretionizing and generally darkening counsel by words without knowledge. He was a youth somewhere around his early twenties, and he was serving the company at Stuart Lake in British Columbia--a sort of American Trossachs on a colossal scale. He had been sent eastward with a party to bring some furs across from MacLeod Lake in the most heavily wooded mountains. It was mid-winter. Fort MacLeod was short of provisions. On their way back travel proved very heavy and slow. Snow buried the beaten trail, and travel off it plunged men and horses through snow crust into a criss-cross tangle of underbrush and windfall. The party ran out of food. It was thought if Hall, the youngest and lightest, could push ahead on snowshoes to Stuart Lake, he could bring out a rescue party with food. He set off without horse or gun and with only a lump of tallow in his pocket as food. The distance was seventy-five miles. At first he ran on winged feet--feet winged with hunger; but it began to snow heavily with a wind that beat in his face and blew great gusts of snow pack down from the evergreen branches overhead; and even feet winged with hunger and snowshoes clog from soft snow and catch derelict branches sticking up through the drifts. By the time you have run half a day beating against the wind, reversing your own tracks to find the chipped mark on the bark of the trees to keep you on the blazed trail--you are hungry. Hall began to nibble at his tallow as he ran and to snatch handfuls of snow to quench his thirst. At night he kindled a roaring big white-man fire against the wolves, dried out the thawed snow from his back and front, dozed between times, sang to keep the loneliness off, heard the muffled echo come back to him in smothered voice, and at first streak of dawn ran on, and on, and on. By the second night Hall had eaten all his tallow. He had also reefed in his belt so that his stomach and spine seemed to be camping together. The snow continued to fall. The trees swam past him as he ran. And the snowdrifts lifted and fell as he jogged heavily forward. Of course, he declared to himself, he was not dizzy. It was the snow blindness or the drifts. He was well aware the second night that if he would have let himself he would have dug a sleeping hole in the snow and wrapped himself in a snow blanket and slept and slept; but he thrashed himself awake, and set out again, dead heavy with sleep, weak from fatigue, staggering from hunger; and the wings on his feet had become weighted with lead.