“The good Lord only knows,” he growled down into the face of the young woman whose prettiness would have enticed the most chivalrous attention from him earlier in the evening.  “Engine and tender been gone three hours and the divisional point only twenty miles up the line.  Should have been back with help long ago.  Hell, ain’t it?”

The young woman did not reply, but her round mouth formed a quick and silent approbation of his final remark.

“Three hours!” the train-man continued his growling as he went on with his lantern.  “That’s the hell o’ railroading it along the edge of the Arctic.  When you git snowed in you’re snowed in, an’ there ain’t no two ways about it!”

He paused at the smoking compartment, thrust in his head for a moment, passed on and slammed the door of the car after him as he went into the next coach.

In that smoking compartment there were two men, facing each other across the narrow space between the two seats.  They had not looked up when the train-man thrust in his head.  They seemed, as one leaned over toward the other, wholly oblivious of the storm.

It was the older man who bent forward.  He was about fifty.  The hand that rested for a moment on David Raine’s knee was red and knotted.  It was the hand of a man who had lived his life in struggling with the wilderness.  And the face, too, was of such a man; a face coloured and toughened by the tannin of wind and blizzard and hot northern sun, with eyes cobwebbed about by a myriad of fine lines that spoke of years spent under the strain of those things.  He was not a large man.  He was shorter than David Raine.  There was a slight droop to his shoulders.  Yet about him there was a strength, a suppressed energy ready to act, a zestful eagerness for life and its daily mysteries which the other and younger man did not possess.  Throughout many thousands of square miles of the great northern wilderness this older man was known as Father Roland, the Missioner.

His companion was not more than thirty-eight.  Perhaps he was a year or two younger.  It may be that the wailing of the wind outside, the strange voices that were in it and the chilling gloom of their little compartment made of him a more striking contrast to Father Roland than he would have been under other conditions.  His eyes were a clear and steady gray as they met Father Roland’s.  They were eyes that one could not easily forget.  Except for his eyes he was like a man who had been sick, and was still sick.  The Missioner had made his own guess.  And now, with his hand on the other’s knee, he said: 

“And you say—­that you are afraid—­for this friend of yours?”

David Raine nodded his head.  Lines deepened a little about his mouth.

“Yes, I am afraid.”  For a moment he turned to the night.  A fiercer volley of the little snow demons beat against the window, as though his pale face just beyond their reach stirred them to greater fury.  “I have a most disturbing inclination to worry about him,” he added, and shrugged his shoulders slightly.