Fifteen years ago! He stopped and looked up, the starlight whitening
his face. There was no change in this night from that other one of
ages and ages ago. There were the same stars, like fierce eyes of pale
fire, robbed of softness by the polar cold; there were the same
cloudless blue space, the same hissing flashes of the aurora leaping
through its infinity, the same trees that had listened to his moaning
prayers on that night when he had staggered into Lac Bain.
He went on until he came to where the beaten trail swept up and away
from a swamp. As vividly as if it had happened but yesterday, he
remembered how he had dragged himself through this swamp, bleeding and
starving, his violin clutched to his breast, guided by the barking of
dogs, which seemed to come from a million miles away. He plunged into
it now, picking his tangled way until he stood upon a giant ridge,
from which he looked out through the white night into the limitless
barrens to the north.
Along the edge of those barrens he had come, daring the hundred deaths
between hunter's cabin and Indian wigwam, starving at times, almost
dying of cold, building fires to keep the wolves back, and playing--
always playing to keep up his courage, until he found Melisse. Fifteen
years had passed since then, and the cumulative force of the things
that had grown out of those years had fallen upon him this day.
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