“Colonel!”

Silence—­like a negation of all puny things, friendship, human life—­

“Colonel!”

Silence.  No wonder men went mad up here, when they didn’t drown this silence in strong drink.

On and on he ran, till he felt sure he must have passed the Colonel, unless—­yes, there were those air-holes in the river ice ...  He felt choked and stopped to breathe.  Should he go back?  It was horrible to turn.  It was like admitting that the man was not to be found—­that this was the end.

“Colonel!”

He said to himself that he would go back, and build a fire for a signal, and return; but he ran on farther and farther away from the sled and from the forest.  Was it growing faintly light?  He looked up.  Oh, yes; presently it would be brighter still.  Those streamers of pale light dancing in the North; they would be green and scarlet and orange and purple, and the terrible white world would be illumined as by conflagration.  He stopped again.  That the Colonel should have dropped so far back as this, and the man in front not know—­it was incredible.  What was that?  A shadow on the ice.  A frozen hummock?  No, a man.  Was it really....?  Glory hallelujah—­it was! But the shadow lay there ghastly still and the Boy’s greeting died in his throat.  He had found the Colonel, but he had found him delivered over to that treacherous sleep that seldom knows a waking.  The Boy dropped down beside his friend, and wasn’t far off crying.  But it was a tonic to young nerves to see how, like one dead, the man lay there, for all the calling and tugging by the arm.  The Boy rolled the body over, pulled open the things at the neck, and thrust his hand down, till he could feel the heart beating.  He jumped up, got a handful of snow, and rubbed the man’s face with it.  At last a feeble protest—­an effort to get away from the Boy’s rude succour.

“Thank God!  Colonel!  Colonel! wake up!”

He shook him hard.  But the big man only growled sullenly, and let his leaden weight drop back heavily on the ice.  The Boy got hold of the neck of the Colonel’s parki and pulled him frantically along the ice a few yards, and then realised that only the terror of the moment gave him the strength to do that much.  To drag a man of the Colonel’s weight all the way to the wood was stark impossibility.  He couldn’t get him eighty yards.  If he left him and went for the sled and fuel, the man would be dead by the time he got back.  If he stayed, they would both be frozen in a few hours.  It was pretty horrible.

He felt faint and dizzy.  It occurred to him that he would pray.  He was an agnostic all right, but the Colonel was past praying for himself; and here was his friend—­an agnostic—­here he was on his knees.  He hadn’t prayed since he was a little chap down in the South.  How did the prayers go?  “Our Father”—­he looked up at the reddening aurora—­“Our Father, who art in heaven—­” His eyes