in the line of their hardy
And the Trail! Not the freezing nor the starvation nor the illusion were so potent in the deeper discouragement of the spirit as that. Always it led on. They could see it; they could see its direction; that was all. Tireless it ran on and on and on. For all they knew the Indian, hearty and confident in his wilderness strength, might be watching them at every moment, laughing at the feeble thirty feet their pain bought them, gliding on swiftly in an hour farther than they could travel in a day. This possibility persisted until, in their minds, it became the fact. They endowed their enemy with all they themselves lacked; with strength, with swiftness, with the sustenance of life. Yet never for a moment did it occur to them to abandon the pursuit.
Sam was growing uncertain in his movements; Dick was plainly going mad. The girl followed; that was all one could say, for whatever suffering she proved was hidden beneath race stolidity, and more nobly beneath a great devotion.
And then late one afternoon they came to a bloody spot on the snow. Here Jingoss had killed. Here he had found what had been denied them, what they needed so sorely. The North was on his side. He now had meat in plenty, and meat meant strength, and strength meant swiftness, and swiftness meant the safety of this world for him and the certainty of the next for them. The tenuous hope that had persisted through all the psychological pressure the North had brought to bear, the hope that they had not even acknowledged to themselves, the hope based merely on the circumstance that they did not _know_, was routed by this one fact. Now they could no longer shelter behind the flimsy screen of an ignorance of their enemy’s condition. They knew. The most profound discouragement descended on them.
But even yet they did not yield to the great antagonist. The strength of meat lacked them: the strength of despair remained. A rapid dash might bring them to grapples. And somewhere in the depths of their indomitable spirits, somewhere in the line of their hardy, Anglo-Saxon descent, they knew they would find the necessary vitality.
Stars glittered like sparks on polished steel. On the northwest wind swooped the chill of the winter’s end, and in that chill was the breath of the North. Sam Bolton, crushed by the weight of a great exhaustion, recognised the familiar menace, and raised his head, gazing long from glazed eyes out into the Silent Places.
"Not yet!" he said aloud.
Chapter 27
But the next morning he was unable to rise. The last drop of his vitality had run out. At length the connection between his will and his body had been severed, so that the latter was no longer under his command. After the first moment he knew well enough what this meant, knew that here he must die, here he must lie crushed finally under the sheer weight of his antagonist. It was as though she, the great North, had heard his defiant words the night before, and thus proved to him their emptiness.
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