A strange sickness crept through his blood; it grew in his head, so that when noon came, he did not trouble himself to eat.
It was late in the afternoon when he saw far ahead of him the clump of cottonwoods near the warm springs, very near his home.

Often he had come to these old cottonwoods, an oasis of timber lost in the great tundras, and he had built himself a little camp among them.

He loved the place.
It had seemed to him that now and then he must visit the forlorn trees to give them cheer and comradeship.

His father's name was carved in the bole of the greatest of them all, and under it the date and day when the elder Holt had discovered them in a land where no man had gone before.
And under his father's name was his mother's, and under that, his own.
He had made of the place a sort of shrine, a green and sweet-flowered tabernacle of memories, and its bird-song and peace in summer and the weird aloneness of it in winter had played their parts in the making of his soul.

Through many months he had anticipated this hour of his home-coming, when in the distance he would see the beckoning welcome of the old cottonwoods, with the rolling foothills and frosted peaks of the Endicott Mountains beyond.