and look back.  Over their heads the wind wailed and moaned in the spruce tops, but even above that sound came the roar of the fire.  Against his breast Philip heard a sobbing cry, and suddenly he held the girl closer, and crushed his face down against hers, fighting to keep back the horror that was gripping at his heart.  Even as he felt her arms creeping up out of the bearskin and clinging about his neck he felt upon him like a weight of lead the hopelessness of a despair as black as the night itself.  The cabin was now a pillar of flame, and in it was everything that had made life possible for them.  Food, shelter, clothing—­all were gone.  In this moment he did not think of himself, but of the girl he held in his arms, and he strained her closer and kissed her lips and her eyes and her tumbled hair there in the storm-swept darkness, telling her what he knew was now a lie—­that she was safe, that nothing could harm her.  Against him he felt the tremble and throb of her soft body, and it was this that filled him with the horror of the thing—­the terror of the thought that her one garment was a bearskin.  He had felt, a moment before, the chill touch of a naked little foot.

And yet he kept saying, with his face against hers: 

“It’s all right, little sweetheart.  We’ll come out all right—­we sure will!”

CHAPTER XVI

His first impulse, after those few appalling seconds following their escape from the fire, was to save something from the cabin.  Still talking to Celie he dropped on his knees and tucked her up warmly in the bearskin, with her back to a tree.  He thanked God that it was a big skin and that it enveloped her completely.  Leaving her there he ran back through the gate.  He no longer feared the wolves.  If they had not already escaped into the forest he knew they would not attack him in that hot glare of the one thing above all others they feared—­fire.  For a space thought of the Eskimos, and the probability of the fire bringing them from wherever they had sought shelter from the storm, was secondary to the alarming necessity which faced him.  Because of his restlessness and his desire to be ready for any emergency he had not undressed when he threw himself on his bunk that night, but he was without a coat or cap.  And Celie!  He cried out aloud in his anguish when he stopped just outside the deadline of the furnace of flame that was once the cabin, and standing there with clenched hands he cursed himself for the carelessness that had brought her face to face with a peril deadlier than the menace of the Eskimos or Bram Johnson’s wolves.  He alone was responsible.  His indiscretion in overfilling the stove had caused the fire, and in that other moment—­when he might have snatched up more than the bearskin—­his mind had failed to act.

In the short space he stood there helplessly in the red heat of the fire the desperateness of the situation seared itself like the hot flame itself in his brain.  As prisoners in Bram’s cabin, guarded by the wolves and attacked by the Eskimos, they still had shelter, food, clothing—­a chance to live, at least the chance to fight.  And now—­