He felt rebuked for vulgarity, as though he had been found shouting in a cathedral-nave where priests were praying for the peace of souls of the departed. He desired to hide himself; entering his shack, he pushed to the door. He was tired; his brain ached with thought, and his thought was disjointed. He could not believe that Spurling had ever come; it was all an hallucination. Thinking about the past had made him imagine all that, or else he had dreamed it in the night. He went over detail by detail all that had seemed to him to happen; and even then, when it fitted reasonably together, he could not be certain. It was too monstrous that Spurling should have become like that! He would not believe it. Then his anxiety for Mordaunt sprang up and commenced to craze him. The terrible question throbbed through his mind, "Is Mordaunt dead?"
The mania for questions grew upon him. Three separate voices spoke clamorously at once: "Is Mordaunt dead?"
He stumbled to the far end of the room and flung himself down in his bunk, burying his face in its coverings that he might shut out the light and gain a moment's rest. But his imaginings followed and knelt beside him.
"Well, if I must think," he whispered, "I will think of that which is best." He beckoned from out the shadows his memory of Mordaunt's face, and gave himself over to recalling all that it once had meant. They had nicknamed him "The Girl" because of his shyness and modesty, and had not always been particular in the jokes which they had made at his expense. Yes, and he had had a woman's ways from first to last. Nothing that had happened had been able to coarsen him; he had never given way to loose talk or brutal jests, and in the presence of suffering had invariably been full of tenderness.
Good heavens! pass on to the crisis--to that day when he had come to the top of the shaft and called down to him! He had answered his call, praying him in an agonized voice to descend and rescue him. He could see him now approaching hurriedly, yet cautiously, through the darkness, lifting high up his swinging lamp so that its rays fell across his face. He could still remember how absurd it had seemed to suppose that a creature, so small and fragile, could save him from _that other_. Yet he had; and after that, because of the relief he felt, he had confessed. Then, in a moment of compassionate self-forgetfulness, Mordaunt had placed his arms about him and had drawn down his head upon his breast--an action of which no man in dealing with another man was ever capable; the mother-instinct was manifested there. In the flickering lamplight, with his head pressed close to his companion's breast, feeling its rise and fall at each struggling intake of the breath, crouching underground upon the bed-rock, he had guessed the secret--_that Mordaunt was not a man_. From that hour he had loved her. She had never known that he shared her secret. Thank God, he had remained so much a gentleman that he had not told her that! Who she was, why she had come to the Klondike, what was her proper name, he had not permitted himself to inquire; for him it had been sufficient that she was a woman, and that he loved her, and that he was unworthy of her love. After she had seen him shoot at Spurling he had avoided her, lest by contact with him she should be defiled. He had vaguely hoped at the time of leaving that the day might come, after he had cleansed himself and proved himself a man, when he might seek her out and ask her to be his wife. Through the last three years he had lived for that. To have asked her then would have been an insult, an act of cowardice. How would an upright woman answer a man whom she had just saved from homicide? How would she regard a man who had discovered the secret of her sex in such a manner, because of her compassion, and had not had the decency to keep that knowledge secret even from herself? So he had fled from the Shallows for a double reason; that he might not do violence to Spurling, and that he might not betray himself to her. He had left her without a hint of his going, or a word of explanation.