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Back to God's Country and Other Stories by James Oliver Curwood
Book, page 151 / 172

changed Peter God's handwriting. His treachery, if it could be called
that, would never be discovered. And it would give him Josephine.

This was the temptation. The power that resisted it was the spirit of
that big, clean, fighting North which makes men out of a beginning of
flesh and bone. Ten years of that North had seeped into Philip's being.
He hung on. It was November when he reached Port MacPherson, and he had
not opened the letter.

Deep snows fell, and fierce blizzards shot like gunblasts from out of the
Arctic. Snow and wind were not what brought the deeper gloom and fear to
Fort MacPherson. La mort rouge, smallpox,--the "red death,"--was
galloping through the wilderness. Rumors were first verified by facts
from the Dog Eib Indians. A quarter of them were down with the scourge of
the Northland. From Hudson's Bay on the east to the Great Bear on the
west, the fur posts were sending out their runners, and a hundred Paul
Reveres of the forests were riding swiftly behind their dogs to spread
the warning. On the afternoon of the day Philip left for the cabin of
Peter God, a patrol of the Royal Mounted came in on snowshoes from the
South, and voluntarily went into quarantine.

Philip traveled slowly. For three days and nights the air was filled with
the "Arctic dust" snow that was hard as flint and stung like shot; and it
was so cold that he paused frequently and built small fires, over which
he filled his lungs with hot air and smoke. He knew what it meant to have
the lungs "touched"--sloughing away in the spring, blood-spitting, and
certain death.

On the fourth day the temperature began to rise; the fifth it was clear,
and thirty degrees warmer. His thermometer had gone to sixty below zero.
It was now thirty below.

It was the morning of the sixth day when he reached the thick fringe of
stunted spruce that sheltered Peter God's cabin. He was half blinded. The
snow-filled blizzards cut his face until it was swollen and purple.
Twenty paces from Peter God's cabin he stopped, and stared, and rubbed
his eyes--and rubbed them again--as though not quite sure his vision was
not playing him a trick.

A cry broke from his lips then. Over Peter God's door there was nailed a

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