They had become acquainted. And later the Little
Missioner had told him how those vast forests reached without a break
for hundreds of miles into the mysterious North. He loved them, even as
they lay cold and white outside the windows. There was gladness in his
voice when he had said that he was going back into them. They were a
part of _his_ world--a world of "mystery and savage glory" he had
called it, stretching for a thousand miles to the edge of the Arctic,
and fifteen hundred miles from Hudson's Bay to the western mountains.
And to-night he had said, "Will you come with me?"
David's pulse quickened. A thousand little snow demons beat in his face
to challenge his courage. The wind swept down, as if enraged at the
thought in his mind, and scooped up volley after volley of drifting snow
and hurled them at him. There was only the thin glass between. It was
like the defiance of a living thing. It threatened him. It dared him. It
invited him out like a great bully, with a brawling show of fists. He
had always been more or less pusillanimous in the face of winter. He
disliked cold. He hated snow. But this that beat and shrieked at him
outside the window had set something stirring strangely within him. It
was a desire, whimsical and undecided at first, to thrust his face out
into that darkness and feel the sting of the wind and snow.
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