The Night-Born Read online

  Produced by J.R. Wright

  THE NIGHT-BORN

  By Jack London

  CONTENTS:

  THE NIGHT-BORN THE MADNESS OF JOHN HARNED WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT WINGED BLACKMAIL BUNCHES OF KNUCKLES WAR UNDER THE DECK AWNINGS TO KILL A MAN THE MEXICAN

  THE NIGHT-BORN

  It was in the old Alta-Inyo Club--a warm night for San Francisco--andthrough the open windows, hushed and far, came the brawl of the streets.The talk had led on from the Graft Prosecution and the latest signsthat the town was to be run wide open, down through all the grotesquesordidness and rottenness of man-hate and man-meanness, until the nameof O'Brien was mentioned--O'Brien, the promising young pugilist whohad been killed in the prize-ring the night before. At once the airhad seemed to freshen. O'Brien had been a clean-living young man withideals. He neither drank, smoked, nor swore, and his had been the bodyof a beautiful young god. He had even carried his prayer-book to theringside. They found it in his coat pocket in the dressing-room...afterward.

  Here was Youth, clean and wholesome, unsullied--the thing of glory andwonder for men to conjure with..... after it has been lost to them andthey have turned middle-aged. And so well did we conjure, that Romancecame and for an hour led us far from the man-city and its snarling roar.Bardwell, in a way, started it by quoting from Thoreau; but it was oldTrefethan, bald-headed and dewlapped, who took up the quotation and forthe hour to come was romance incarnate. At first we wondered how manyScotches he had consumed since dinner, but very soon all that wasforgotten.

  "It was in 1898--I was thirty-five then," he said. "Yes, I know you areadding it up. You're right. I'm forty-seven now; look ten years more;and the doctors say--damn the doctors anyway!"

  He lifted the long glass to his lips and sipped it slowly to soothe awayhis irritation.

  "But I was young... once. I was young twelve years ago, and I hadhair on top of my head, and my stomach was lean as a runner's, and thelongest day was none too long for me. I was a husky back there in '98.You remember me, Milner. You knew me then. Wasn't I a pretty good bit ofall right?"

  Milner nodded and agreed. Like Trefethan, he was another mining engineerwho had cleaned up a fortune in the Klondike.

  "You certainly were, old man," Milner said. "I'll never forget whenyou cleaned out those lumberjacks in the M. & M. that night thatlittle newspaper man started the row. Slavin was in the country atthe time,"--this to us--"and his manager wanted to get up a match withTrefethan."

  "Well, look at me now," Trefethan commanded angrily. "That's what theGoldstead did to me--God knows how many millions, but nothing left in mysoul..... nor in my veins. The good red blood is gone. I am a jellyfish,a huge, gross mass of oscillating protoplasm, a--a..."

  But language failed him, and he drew solace from the long glass.

  "Women looked at me then; and turned their heads to look a second time.Strange that I never married. But the girl. That's what I started totell you about. I met her a thousand miles from anywhere, and then some.And she quoted to me those very words of Thoreau that Bardwell quoted amoment ago--the ones about the day-born gods and the night-born."

  "It was after I had made my locations on Goldstead--and didn't know whata treasure-pot that that trip creek was going to prove--that I made thattrip east over the Rockies, angling across to the Great Up North therethe Rockies are something more than a back-bone. They are a boundary,a dividing line, a wall impregnable and unscalable. There is nointercourse across them, though, on occasion, from the early days,wandering trappers have crossed them, though more were lost by the waythan ever came through. And that was precisely why I tackled the job. Itwas a traverse any man would be proud to make. I am prouder of it rightnow than anything else I have ever done.

  "It is an unknown land. Great stretches of it have never been explored.There are big valleys there where the white man has never set foot, andIndian tribes as primitive as ten thousand years... almost, for theyhave had some contact with the whites. Parties of them come out once ina while to trade, and that is all. Even the Hudson Bay Company failed tofind them and farm them.

  "And now the girl. I was coming up a stream--you'd call it a river inCalifornia--uncharted--and unnamed. It was a noble valley, now shut inby high canyon walls, and again opening out into beautiful stretches,wide and long, with pasture shoulder-high in the bottoms, meadows dottedwith flowers, and with clumps of timberspruce--virgin and magnificent.The dogs were packing on their backs, and were sore-footed and playedout; while I was looking for any bunch of Indians to get sleds anddrivers from and go on with the first snow. It was late fall, butthe way those flowers persisted surprised me. I was supposed to be insub-arctic America, and high up among the buttresses of the Rockies,and yet there was that everlasting spread of flowers. Some day the whitesettlers will be in there and growing wheat down all that valley.

  "And then I lifted a smoke, and heard the barking of the dogs--Indiandogs--and came into camp. There must have been five hundred of them,proper Indians at that, and I could see by the jerking-frames that thefall hunting had been good. And then I met her--Lucy. That was her name.Sign language--that was all we could talk with, till they led me to abig fly--you know, half a tent, open on the one side where a campfireburned. It was all of moose-skins, this fly--moose-skins, smoke-cured,hand-rubbed, and golden-brown. Under it everything was neat and orderlyas no Indian camp ever was. The bed was laid on fresh spruce boughs.There were furs galore, and on top of all was a robe of swanskins--whiteswan-skins--I have never seen anything like that robe. And on top of it,sitting cross-legged, was Lucy. She was nut-brown. I have called her agirl. But she was not. She was a woman, a nut-brown woman, an Amazon, afull-blooded, full-bodied woman, and royal ripe. And her eyes were blue.

  "That's what took me off my feet--her eyes--blue, not China blue, butdeep blue, like the sea and sky all melted into one, and very wise. Morethan that, they had laughter in them--warm laughter, sun-warm and human,very human, and... shall I say feminine? They were. They were a woman'seyes, a proper woman's eyes. You know what that means. Can I say more?Also, in those blue eyes were, at the same time, a wild unrest, awistful yearning, and a repose, an absolute repose, a sort of all-wiseand philosophical calm."

  Trefethan broke off abruptly.

  "You fellows think I am screwed. I'm not. This is only my fifth sincedinner. I am dead sober. I am solemn. I sit here now side by side withmy sacred youth. It is not I--'old' Trefethan--that talks; it is myyouth, and it is my youth that says those were the most wonderful eyesI have ever seen--so very calm, so very restless; so very wise, so verycurious; so very old, so very young; so satisfied and yet yearning sowistfully. Boys, I can't describe them. When I have told you about her,you may know better for yourselves."

  "She did not stand up. But she put out her hand."

  "'Stranger,' she said, 'I'm real glad to see you.'

  "I leave it to you--that sharp, frontier, Western tang of speech.Picture my sensations. It was a woman, a white woman, but that tang!It was amazing that it should be a white woman, here, beyond the lastboundary of the world--but the tang. I tell you, it hurt. It was likethe stab of a flatted note. And yet, let me tell you, that woman was apoet. You shall see."

  "She dismissed the Indians. And, by Jove, they went. They took herorders and followed her blind. She was hi-yu skookam chief. She told thebucks to make a camp for me and to take care of my dogs. And theydid, too. And they knew enough not to get away with as much as amoccasin-lace of my outfit. She was a regular She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed,and I want to tell you it chilled me to the marrow, sent those littlethrills Marathoning up and down my spinal column, meeting a white womanout there at the head of a tribe of savages a thousand miles the otherside of No Man's Land.


  "'Stranger," she said, 'I reckon you're sure the first white that everset foot in this valley. Set down an' talk a spell, and then we'll havea bite to eat. Which way might you be comin'?'

  "There it was, that tang again. But from now to the end of the yarn Iwant you to forget it. I tell you I forgot it, sitting there on the edgeof that swan-skin robe and listening and looking at the most wonderfulwoman that ever stepped out of the pages of Thoreau or of any otherman's book.

  "I stayed on there a week. It was on her invitation. She promised to fitme out with dogs and sleds and with Indians that would put me acrossthe best pass of the Rockies in five hundred miles. Her fly was pitchedapart from the others, on the high bank by the river, and a couple ofIndian girls did her cooking for her and the camp work. And so we talkedand talked, while the first snow fell and continued to fall and make asurface for my sleds. And this was her story.

  "She was frontier-born, of poor settlers, and you know what thatmeans--work, work, always work, work in plenty and without end.

  "'I never seen the glory of the world,' she said. 'I had no time. I knewit was right out there, anywhere, all around the cabin, but there wasalways the bread to set, the scrubbin' and the washin' and the work thatwas never done. I used to be plumb sick at times, jes' to get out intoit all, especially in the spring when the songs of the birds drove memost clean crazy. I wanted to run out through the long pasture grass,wetting my legs with the dew of it, and to climb the rail fence, andkeep on through the timber and up and up over the divide so as to get alook around. Oh, I had all kinds of hankerings--to follow up thecanyon beds and slosh around from pool to pool, making friends withthe water-dogs and the speckly trout; to peep on the sly and watch thesquirrels and rabbits and small furry things and see what they was doingand learn the secrets of their ways. Seemed to me, if I had time, Icould crawl among the flowers, and, if I was good and quiet, catch themwhispering with themselves, telling all kinds of wise things that merehumans never know.'"

  Trefethan paused to see that his glass had been refilled.

  "Another time she said: 'I wanted to run nights like a wild thing, justto run through the moonshine and under the stars, to run white and nakedin the darkness that I knew must feel like cool velvet, and to run andrun and keep on running. One evening, plumb tuckered out--it had been adreadful hard hot day, and the bread wouldn't raise and the churning hadgone wrong, and I was all irritated and jerky--well, that evening Imade mention to dad of this wanting to run of mine. He looked at mecurious-some and a bit scared. And then he gave me two pills to take.Said to go to bed and get a good sleep and I'd be all hunky-dory inthe morning. So I never mentioned my hankerings to him, or any one anymore.'

  "The mountain home broke up--starved out, I imagine--and the family cameto Seattle to live. There she worked in a factory--long hours, youknow, and all the rest, deadly work. And after a year of that she becamewaitress in a cheap restaurant--hash-slinger, she called it. She saidto me once, 'Romance I guess was what I wanted. But there wan't noromance floating around in dishpans and washtubs, or in factories andhash-joints.'

  "When she was eighteen she married--a man who was going up to Juneau tostart a restaurant. He had a few dollars saved, and appeared prosperous.She didn't love him--she was emphatic about that, but she was all tiredout, and she wanted to get away from the unending drudgery. Besides,Juneau was in Alaska, and her yearning took the form of a desire to seethat wonderland. But little she saw of it. He started the restaurant,a little cheap one, and she quickly learned what he had married herfor..... to save paying wages. She came pretty close to running thejoint and doing all the work from waiting to dishwashing. She cookedmost of the time as well. And she had four years of it.

  "Can't you picture her, this wild woods creature, quick with every oldprimitive instinct, yearning for the free open, and mowed up in a vilelittle hash-joint and toiling and moiling for four mortal years?

  "'There was no meaning in anything,' she said. 'What was it all about!Why was I born! Was that all the meaning of life--just to work and workand be always tired!--to go to bed tired and to wake up tired, withevery day like every other day unless it was harder?' She had heard talkof immortal life from the gospel sharps, she said, but she couldnot reckon that what she was doin' was a likely preparation for herimmortality.

  "But she still had her dreams, though more rarely. She had read a fewbooks--what, it is pretty hard to imagine, Seaside Library novels mostlikely; yet they had been food for fancy. 'Sometimes,' she said, 'whenI was that dizzy from the heat of the cooking that if I didn't takea breath of fresh air I'd faint, I'd stick my head out of the kitchenwindow, and close my eyes and see most wonderful things. All of a suddenI'd be traveling down a country road, and everything clean and quiet,no dust, no dirt; just streams ripplin' down sweet meadows, and lambsplaying, breezes blowing the breath of flowers, and soft sunshine overeverything; and lovely cows lazying knee-deep in quiet pools, and younggirls bathing in a curve of stream all white and slim and natural--andI'd know I was in Arcady. I'd read about that country once, in a book.And maybe knights, all flashing in the sun, would come riding around abend in the road, or a lady on a milk-white mare, and in the distanceI could see the towers of a castle rising, or I just knew, on the nextturn, that I'd come upon some palace, all white and airy and fairy-like,with fountains playing, and flowers all over everything, and peacockson the lawn..... and then I'd open my eyes, and the heat of thecooking range would strike on me, and I'd hear Jake sayin'--he was myhusband--I'd hear Jake sayin', "Why ain't you served them beans? Think Ican wait here all day!" Romance!--I reckon the nearest I ever come toit was when a drunken Armenian cook got the snakes and tried to cut mythroat with a potato knife and I got my arm burned on the stove before Icould lay him out with the potato stomper.

  "'I wanted easy ways, and lovely things, and Romance and all that; butit just seemed I had no luck nohow and was only and expressly born forcooking and dishwashing. There was a wild crowd in Juneau them days, butI looked at the other women, and their way of life didn't excite me.I reckon I wanted to be clean. I don't know why; I just wanted to, Iguess; and I reckoned I might as well die dishwashing as die their way."

  Trefethan halted in his tale for a moment, completing to himself somethread of thought.

  "And this is the woman I met up there in the Arctic, running a tribe ofwild Indians and a few thousand square miles of hunting territory. Andit happened, simply enough, though, for that matter, she might havelived and died among the pots and pans. But 'Came the whisper, came thevision.' That was all she needed, and she got it.

  "'I woke up one day,' she said. 'Just happened on it in a scrap ofnewspaper. I remember every word of it, and I can give it to you.' Andthen she quoted Thoreau's Cry of the Human:

  "'The young pines springing up, in the corn field from year to year areto me a refreshing fact. We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that isnot the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofnessof his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native godsand is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society withnature. He has glances of starry recognition, to which our saloonsare strangers. The steady illumination of his qenius, dim only becausedistant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars comparedwith the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles. TheSociety Islanders had their day-born gods, but they were not supposed tobe of equal antiquity with the..... night-born gods.'

  "That's what she did, repeated it word for word, and I forgot the tang,for it was solemn, a declaration of religion--pagan, if you will; andclothed in the living garmenture of herself.

  "'And the rest of it was torn away,' she added, a great emptiness in hervoice. 'It was only a scrap of newspaper. But that Thoreau was a wiseman. I wish I knew more about him.' She stopped a moment, and I swearher face was ineffably holy as she said, 'I could have made him a goodwife.'

  "And then she went on. 'I knew right away, as soon as I read that, whatwas the matter with me.
I was a night-born. I, who had lived all mylife with the day-born, was a night-born. That was why I had never beensatisfied with cooking and dishwashing; that was why I had hankered torun naked in the moonlight. And I knew that this dirty little Juneauhash-joint was no place for me. And right there and then I said, "Iquit." I packed up my few rags of clothes, and started. Jake saw me andtried to stop me.

  "'What you doing?" he says.

  "'Divorcin' you and me,' I says. 'I'm headin' for tall timber and whereI belong.'"

  "'No you don't,' he says, reaching for me to stop me. 'The cooking hasgot on your head. You listen to me talk before you up and do anythingbrash.'

  "But I pulled a gun-a little Colt's forty-four--and says, 'This does mytalkin' for me.'

  "And I left."

  Trefethan emptied his glass and called for another.

  "Boys, do you know what that girl did? She was twenty-two. She had spenther life over the dish-pan and she knew no more about the world than Ido of the fourth dimension, or the fifth. All roads led to her desire.No; she didn't head for the dance-halls. On the Alaskan Pan-handle itis preferable to travel by water. She went down to the beach. An Indiancanoe was starting for Dyea--you know the kind, carved out of a singletree, narrow and deep and sixty feet long. She gave them a couple ofdollars and got on board.

  "'Romance?' she told me. 'It was Romance from the jump. There were threefamilies altogether in that canoe, and that crowded there wasn't room toturn around, with dogs and Indian babies sprawling over everything, andeverybody dipping a paddle and making that canoe go.' And all around thegreat solemn mountains, and tangled drifts of clouds and sunshine. Andoh, the silence! the great wonderful silence! And, once, the smoke ofa hunter's camp, away off in the distance, trailing among the trees.It was like a picnic, a grand picnic, and I could see my dreams comingtrue, and I was ready for something to happen 'most any time. And itdid.

  "'And that first camp, on the island! And the boys spearing fish in themouth of the creek, and the big deer one of the bucks shot just aroundthe point. And there were flowers everywhere, and in back from the beachthe grass was thick and lush and neck-high. And some of the girls wentthrough this with me, and we climbed the hillside behind and pickedberries and roots that tasted sour and were good to eat. And we cameupon a big bear in the berries making his supper, and he said "Oof!" andran away as scared as we were. And then the camp, and the camp smoke,and the smell of fresh venison cooking. It was beautiful. I was with thenight-born at last, and I knew that was where I belonged. And for thefirst time in my life, it seemed to me, I went to bed happy that night,looking out under a corner of the canvas at the stars cut off black by abig shoulder of mountain, and listening to the night-noises, and knowingthat the same thing would go on next day and forever and ever, for Iwasn't going back. And I never did go back.'

  "'Romance! I got it next day. We had to cross a big arm of theocean--twelve or fifteen miles, at least; and it came on to blow when wewere in the middle. That night I was along on shore, with one wolf-dog,and I was the only one left alive.'

  "Picture it yourself," Trefethan broke off to say. "The canoe waswrecked and lost, and everybody pounded to death on the rocks excepther. She went ashore hanging on to a dog's tail, escaping the rocks andwashing up on a tiny beach, the only one in miles.

  "'Lucky for me it was the mainland,' she said. 'So I headed right awayback, through the woods and over the mountains and straight on anywhere.Seemed I was looking for something and knew I'd find it. I wasn'tafraid. I was night-born, and the big timber couldn't kill me. And onthe second day I found it. I came upon a small clearing and a tumbledowncabin. Nobody had been there for years and years. The roof had fallenin. Rotted blankets lay in the bunks, and pots and pans were on thestove. But that was not the most curious thing. Outside, along theedge of the trees, you can't guess what I found. The skeletons of eighthorses, each tied to a tree. They had starved to death, I reckon, andleft only little piles of bones scattered some here and there. And eachhorse had had a load on its back. There the loads lay, in among thebones--painted canvas sacks, and inside moosehide sacks, and inside themoosehide sacks--what do you think?'"

  She stopped, reached under a corner of the bed among the spruce boughs,and pulled out a leather sack. She untied the mouth and ran out into myhand as pretty a stream of gold as I have ever seen--coarse gold, placergold, some large dust, but mostly nuggets, and it was so fresh and roughthat it scarcely showed signs of water-wash.

  "'You say you're a mining engineer,' she said, 'and you know thiscountry. Can you name a pay-creek that has the color of that gold!'

  "I couldn't! There wasn't a trace of silver. It was almost pure, and Itold her so.

  "'You bet,' she said. 'I sell that for nineteen dollars an ounce. Youcan't get over seventeen for Eldorado gold, and Minook gold don't fetchquite eighteen. Well, that was what I found among the bones--eighthorse-loads of it, one hundred and fifty pounds to the load.'

  "'A quarter of a million dollars!' I cried out.

  "'That's what I reckoned it roughly,' she answered. 'Talk about Romance!And me a slaving the way I had all the years, when as soon as I venturedout, inside three days, this was what happened. And what became of themen that mined all that gold? Often and often I wonder about it. Theyleft their horses, loaded and tied, and just disappeared off the face ofthe earth, leaving neither hide nor hair behind them. I never heard tellof them. Nobody knows anything about them. Well, being the night-born, Ireckon I was their rightful heir.'"

  Trefethan stopped to light a cigar.

  "Do you know what that girl did? She cached the gold, saving out thirtypounds, which she carried back to the coast. Then she signaled a passingcanoe, made her way to Pat Healy's trading post at Dyea, outfitted,and went over Chilcoot Pass. That was in '88--eight years before theKlondike strike, and the Yukon was a howling wilderness. She was afraidof the bucks, but she took two young squaws with her, crossed the lakes,and went down the river and to all the early camps on the Lower Yukon.She wandered several years over that country and then on in to where Imet her. Liked the looks of it, she said, seeing, in her own words, 'abig bull caribou knee-deep in purple iris on the valley-bottom.' Shehooked up with the Indians, doctored them, gained their confidence, andgradually took them in charge. She had only left that country once, andthen, with a bunch of the young bucks, she went over Chilcoot, cleanedup her gold-cache, and brought it back with her.

  "'And here I be, stranger,' she concluded her yarn, 'and here's the mostprecious thing I own.'

  "She pulled out a little pouch of buckskin, worn on her neck like alocket, and opened it. And inside, wrapped in oiled silk, yellowed withage and worn and thumbed, was the original scrap of newspaper containingthe quotation from Thoreau.

  "'And are you happy... satisfied?' I asked her. 'With a quarter of amillion you wouldn't have to work down in the States. You must miss alot.'

  "'Not much,' she answered. 'I wouldn't swop places with any woman downin the States. These are my people; this is where I belong. But thereare times--and in her eyes smoldered up that hungry yearning I'vementioned--'there are times when I wish most awful bad for that Thoreauman to happen along.'

  "'Why?' I asked.

  "'So as I could marry him. I do get mighty lonesome at spells. I'm justa woman--a real woman. I've heard tell of the other kind of women thatgallivanted off like me and did queer things--the sort that becomesoldiers in armies, and sailors on ships. But those women are queerthemselves. They're more like men than women; they look like men andthey don't have ordinary women's needs. They don't want love, nor littlechildren in their arms and around their knees. I'm not that sort. Ileave it to you, stranger. Do I look like a man?'

  "She didn't. She was a woman, a beautiful, nut-brown woman, with asturdy, health-rounded woman's body and with wonderful deep-blue woman'seyes.

  "'Ain't I woman?' she demanded. 'I am. I'm 'most all woman, and thensome. And the funny thing is, though I'm night-born in everything else,I'm not when it comes to mating. I r
eckon that kind likes its own kindbest. That's the way it is with me, anyway, and has been all theseyears.'

  "'You mean to tell me--' I began.

  "'Never,' she said, and her eyes looked into mine with the straightnessof truth. 'I had one husband, only--him I call the Ox; and I reckon he'sstill down in Juneau running the hash-joint. Look him up, if you everget back, and you'll find he's rightly named.'

  "And look him up I did, two years afterward. He was all she said--solidand stolid, the Ox--shuffling around and waiting on the tables.

  "'You need a wife to help you,' I said.

  "'I had one once,' was his answer.

  "'Widower?'

  "'Yep. She went loco. She always said the heat of the cooking wouldget her, and it did. Pulled a gun on me one day and ran away with someSiwashes in a canoe. Caught a blow up the coast and all hands drowned.'"

  Trefethan devoted himself to his glass and remained silent.

  "But the girl?" Milner reminded him.

  "You left your story just as it was getting interesting, tender. Didit?"

  "It did," Trefethan replied. "As she said herself, she was savage ineverything except mating, and then she wanted her own kind. She was verynice about it, but she was straight to the point. She wanted to marryme.

  "'Stranger,' she said, 'I want you bad. You like this sort of life oryou wouldn't be here trying to cross the Rockies in fall weather. It'sa likely spot. You'll find few likelier. Why not settle down! I'll makeyou a good wife.'

  "And then it was up to me. And she waited. I don't mind confessing thatI was sorely tempted. I was half in love with her as it was. You know Ihave never married. And I don't mind adding, looking back over my life,that she is the only woman that ever affected me that way. But it wastoo preposterous, the whole thing, and I lied like a gentleman. I toldher I was already married.

  "'Is your wife waiting for you?' she asked.

  "I said yes.

  "'And she loves you?'

  "I said yes.

  "And that was all. She never pressed her point... except once, and thenshe showed a bit of fire.

  "'All I've got to do,' she said, 'is to give the word, and you don't getaway from here. If I give the word, you stay on... But I ain't going togive it. I wouldn't want you if you didn't want to be wanted... and ifyou didn't want me.'

  "She went ahead and outfitted me and started me on my way.

  "'It's a darned shame, stranger," she said, at parting. 'I like yourlooks, and I like you. If you ever change your mind, come back.'

  "Now there was one thing I wanted to do, and that was to kiss hergood-bye, but I didn't know how to go about it nor how she would takeit.--I tell you I was half in love with her. But she settled it herself.

  "'Kiss me,' she said. 'Just something to go on and remember.'

  "And we kissed, there in the snow, in that valley by the Rockies, andI left her standing by the trail and went on after my dogs. I was sixweeks in crossing over the pass and coming down to the first post onGreat Slave Lake."

  The brawl of the streets came up to us like a distant surf. Asteward, moving noiselessly, brought fresh siphons. And in the silenceTrefethan's voice fell like a funeral bell:

  "It would have been better had I stayed. Look at me."

  We saw his grizzled mustache, the bald spot on his head, the puff-sacksunder his eyes, the sagging cheeks, the heavy dewlap, the generaltiredness and staleness and fatness, all the collapse and ruin of a manwho had once been strong but who had lived too easily and too well.

  "It's not too late, old man," Bardwell said, almost in a whisper.

  "By God! I wish I weren't a coward!" was Trefethan's answering cry. "Icould go back to her. She's there, now. I could shape up and live many along year... with her... up there. To remain here is to commit suicide.But I am an old man--forty-seven--look at me. The trouble is," he liftedhis glass and glanced at it, "the trouble is that suicide of this sortis so easy. I am soft and tender. The thought of the long day's travelwith the dogs appalls me; the thought of the keen frost in the morningand of the frozen sled-lashings frightens me--"

  Automatically the glass was creeping toward his lips. With a swiftsurge of anger he made as if to crash it down upon the floor. Next camehesitancy and second thought. The glass moved upward to his lips andpaused. He laughed harshly and bitterly, but his words were solemn:

  "Well, here's to the Night-Born. She WAS a wonder."