For the moment the
clear tingling air was doing him good. The truth was Long Ede had begun
to be afraid of himself, and the way his mind had been running for the
last forty-eight hours upon green fields and visions of spring.
As he put it to himself, something inside his head was melting.
Biblical texts chattered within him like running brooks, and as they
fleeted he could almost smell the blown meadow-scent. "Take us the
foxes, the little foxes . . . for our vines have tender grapes . . .
A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon
. . . Awake, O north wind, and come, thou south . . . blow upon my
garden, that the spices thereof may flow out . . ." He was
light-headed, and he knew it. He must hold out. They were all going
mad; were, in fact, three parts crazed already, all except the Gaffer.
And the Gaffer relied on him as his right-hand man. One glimpse of the
returning sun--one glimpse only--might save them yet.
He gazed out over the frozen hills, and northward across the ice-pack.
A few streaks of pale violet--the ghost of the Aurora--fronted the moon.
He could see for miles. Bear or fox, no living creature was in sight.
But who could tell what might be hiding behind any one of a thousand
hummocks? He listened. He heard the slow grinding of the ice-pack off
the beach: only that. "Take us the foxes, the little foxes.
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