It was in this famine time that the dour malady known as cabin madness began to show its grisly head; the sickness that seizes upon cabin dwellers shut in with one another and shut off from other human contacts. As his ancestry and rearing would postulate, Philip was the first to fall a victim to the splenetic mania, developing an increasing irritability, with Garth for its principal target. As the hunger pangs grew sharper, Bromley could see that the giant’s rough good nature was slowly breaking down under Philip’s harsh girdings; that a time was approaching in which surly bickerings would flare into open antagonism and violence; and he did his best to stave off the evil day. Unhappily, his best was not good enough. The volcanic outburst came one evening while they were eating their scanty supper. Garth, who had dug his home-made skis out of the slide, had climbed to the slope above the mine to make sure that the tunnel portal and ore piles were not menaced by another avalanche. While he was about it, Philip, coming out of the mine to sharpen drills at the forge, had seen Garth working his way cautiously along the upper slope of the spur. At supper he flatly accused the mountain man of making an examination of the slide menace an excuse for staking off a claim of his own which would intersect the “Little Jean” at a certain depth in the hill. “I’ve been keeping an eye on you!” he wound up harshly. “You may think because we’re tenderfoots we can’t see through a millstone when there’s a hole in it, but if you do, you’re missing it a thousand miles!” “_Philip!_ You don’t know what you’re saying!” Bromley interposed quickly. “Jim’s all right. Why, good Lord!----” “You keep out of it!” Philip snapped back angrily. “You may be blind but by God, I’m not!” The big man was frowning sourly at his accuser. “Say,” he growled in slow belligerence, “I been thinkin’, for quite a li’l’ spell, that the time was a-comin’ when I’d have to take yuh over my knee and larrup yuh a few. I reckon you’ve fetched it, now. You’re the first livin’ live man that ever told Big Jim Garth to his face that he wasn’t on the square; and when you say it, you’re a liar!”