"If I could not trust myself with you, I could not trust myself in the Yukon. Every miner travelling with gold seemed to me a possible victim for my crime. I went about in fear lest I should see that evil thing, which called himself _myself_, returning to keep me company through life. I fled to escape him and, hoping to leave him behind me in the Klondike, went over the winter trail to Skaguay, the route by which two years earlier we had fought our way up, took steamer to Vancouver and came on thence to Winnipeg. My money was all but exhausted when I got there, I was broken in spirit and at my wit's end. By chance I met with Wrath, on whose claim in our first winter we had worked. He had gone back to his independent trading, and, at my request for employment, sent me up here to look after his interests at Murder Point. I was glad to come; after my experience on the Sleeping River, I was distrustful of myself in the company of men, never knowing when that _foreshadowing of my evil desires_ might not return to hound me on to fresh villainies and despair. For one who wished to be alone, Heaven knows, I chose well. You're not burdened with too much society in Keewatin--that isn't the complaint which is most often heard."
Outside the night had long since settled down--a night which with snow and starlight was not dark, but shadowy and ghostlike, making the interval between two days a long-protracted dusk beneath which it was possible to see for miles. Far away in the forest a timber-wolf howled dismally; the huskies in the river-bed, seated on their haunches, lifted up their heads and echoed his complaint. Then all was still again, nothing was audible except the occasional low booming of the ice, when a crack rent its path across the surface and far below the river shook its gyves, as though clapping its hands in expectation of the freedom of the spring to come.
Against the window the silhouette of Spurling loomed up, with the drifting dimness of the starlight for background, and the square of surrounding darkness for a frame of sombre plush; he seemed a man-portrait whom some painter had condemned forever to motionlessness and silence with the magic of his brush, and had nailed on a stretcher, and had hung up for ornament.