Like a bolt from a crossbow, Philip hurled himself upon Garth, clearing the hewn slab that served as a table at a bound. The attack was so sudden that the big man was toppled off the block of wood upon which he was sitting, and the two went down in a fierce clinch. Bromley sprang up and strove to separate the combatants as they rolled over and over upon the earth floor, striking and clutching madly at each other. But the half-rations upon which they had all been starving for weeks proved the better, or at least the more effectual, peacemaker. Breathless exhaustion came speedily to both men to make the frenzied struggle degenerate into a mere beating of the air; and when a sullen peace had been patched up through Bromley’s urgings, Philip staggered outdoors to hold a handful of snow to an eye that had stopped a blow from Garth’s fist in the brief battle. The aftermath of this savage flare-up marked an abysmal difference in the characteristics of the two men; rather, perhaps, it served to mark the distance Philip had come on the road to moral disintegration. Having fought it out with his accuser in some sort, the rough frontiersman was willing to let bygones be bygones; and he tried patiently, in a blundering way, to make this plain. But Philip held stubbornly aloof. With the cabin madness still souring in his veins he had less and less to say to either of his fellow sufferers, and his attitude toward Garth continued to be suspiciously hostile. It was in the latter part of April, when the snow blanket had begun to shrink visibly under the rays of the mounting sun, and the creek in the valley had burst its icy bonds and was running bank full, that they came to the famine end of things. A fortnight earlier even the short working shifts in the mine to which weakness had reduced them had been discontinued, and for days Garth, slipping and sliding on his home-made skis had been going forth with his rifle in search of food, only to return at night empty-handed and with the same growling lament. “I’m jist so razzle-dazzled an’ no-account I ain’t fittin’ to do nothin’ no more! They’s deer a-plenty in these here mount’ins--I see ’em every day; but I can’t see to shoot straight; never will get one less’n it lets me come close enough to grab it by the neck and choke it to death!” With the beginning of the last week in April the losing battle with hunger had become a grim waiting game, with their final reserves of endurance pitted against the chance of the weather. If the thawing weather should continue, if there should be no more storms, a few more days might make foot travel over the passes possible. But even so, the forty miles of snowy wilderness to be traversed loomed dismayingly. Could they, in their weakened condition, fight their way out over the slippery trails? It was an open question, and one which Philip, in whom the cabin madness had now reached the stage of hopeless dejection, answered in a gloomy negative.