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Folsom turned to the wall and hid his face in the crook of his arm, but with his other hand he groped for that of the Hebrew.

The story of the Lulu is history now; in all the north that mine is famous, for it made half a dozen fortunes. In a daze, half doubting the reality of things, Folsom watched a golden stream pour into his lap. All that winter and the next summer the Lulu yielded wondrously, but one of the partners was not happy, his thoughts being ever of the woman who had left him. Prosperity gave him courage, however, and when he discovered that Lois had not remarried he determined to press his luck as a gambler should.

When the second season’s sluicing was over and the ground had frozen he went outside.

The day after he sailed Lois arrived in Nome, on the last boat. She was older, graver; she had heard of the Lulu, but it was not that which had brought her back. She had returned in spite of the Lulu to solve an aching mystery and to learn the why of things. Her husband’s riches–she still considered him her husband–merely made the task more trying.

Advised that Folsom had passed almost within hailing distance of her, she pressed her lips together and took up her problem of living. The prospect of another lonely Alaskan winter frightened her, and yet because of the Lulu she could not return by the ship she had come on. Now that Folsom was a Croesus she could not follow him too closely–he might misunderstand. After all, she reflected, it mattered little to her where she lived.

Guth called at her cabin, but she managed to avoid seeing him, and somehow continued to avoid a meeting.

Late in December some travelers from Candle Creek, while breaking a short cut to the head of Crooked River, came upon an abandoned sled and its impedimenta. Snow and rain and summer sun had bleached its wood, its runners were red streaks of rust, its rawhide lashings had been eaten off, but snugly rolled inside the tarpaulin was a sack of mail. This mail the travelers brought in with them, and the Nome newspapers, in commenting upon the find, reprinted the story of that tragic fight for life in the Arctic hurricane, now almost forgotten.

Folsom’s three letters reached their destination on Christmas Day. They were stained and yellow and blurred in places, for they were three years old, but the woman read them with eyes wide and wondering, and with heart-beats pounding, for it seemed that dead lips spoke to her. Ten minutes later she was standing at Guth’s door, and when he let her in she behaved like one demented. She had the letters hidden in her bosom, and she would not let him see them, but she managed to make known the meaning of her coming.

“You know him,” she cried, hysterically. “You made him rich. You’ve lived alongside of him. Tell me then, has he–has he–changed? These letters are old. Does he still care, or–does he hate me, as he should?”

Guth smiled; he took her shaking hands in his, his voice was gentle. “No, no! He doesn’t hate you. He has never mentioned your name to me, or to any one else, so far as I know, but his money hasn’t satisfied him. He is sad, and he wants you. That is what took him to the States, I’m sure.”

Lois sank into a chair, her face was white, her twisting fingers strained at each other. “I can’t understand. I can’t make head or tail of it,” she moaned. “It seems that I wronged him, but see what ruin he has made for me! Why? Why–?”

“Who can understand the ‘why’ of anything?” inquired the little Hebrew. “I’ve heard him curse the perversity of little things, and rave at what he called the ‘malice of the north wind.’ I didn’t dare to ask him what he meant, but I knew he was thinking of the evil which had come between you two. Who was to blame, or what separated you, he never told me. Well, his bad luck has changed, and yours, too; and I’m happy. Now then, the wireless. You can talk to him. Let us go.”

An hour later a crackling message was hurled into the empty Christmas sky, a message that pulsed through the voids, was relayed over ice and brine and drifted forests to a lonely, brooding man three thousand miles away.

The answer came rushing back:

“Thank God! Am starting north tomorrow. Love and a million kisses. Wait for me.”

Folsom came. Neither ice nor snow, neither winter seas nor trackless wastes, could daunt him, for youth was in his heart and fire ran through his veins. North and west he came by a rimy little steamer, as fast as coal could drive her, then overland more than fifteen hundred miles. His record stands unbroken, and in villages from Katmai to the Kuskokwim the Indians tell of the tall white man with the team of fifteen huskies who raced through as if a demon were at his heels; how he bored headlong into the blizzards and braved January’s fiercest rage; how his guides dropped and his dogs died in their collars. That was how Folsom came.

He was thin and brown, the marks of the frost were bitten deep into his flesh when, one evening in early March, he drove into Nome. He had covered sixty miles on the last day’s run, and his team was staggering. He left the dogs in their harnesses, where they fell, and bounded through the high-banked streets to Lois’s cabin.

It was growing dark, a light gleamed from her window; Folsom glimpsed her moving about inside. He paused to rip the ice from his bearded lips, then he knocked softly, three times.

As he stood there a gentle north wind fanned him. It was deadly cold, but it was fresh and clean and vastly invigorating. There was no malice in it.

At his familiar signal he heard the clatter of a dish, dropped from nerveless fingers, he heard a startled voice cry out his name, then he pressed the latch and entered, smiling.