The Courage of Marge O'Doone, page 109 by James Oliver Curwood
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them like huge wings. It was two o'clock when they camped and built a fire.
So, day after day, they continued into the North. At the end of his tenth day--the sixth after leaving Tavish's--David felt that he was no longer a stranger in the country of the big snows. He did not say as much to Father Roland, for to express such a thought to one who had lived there all his life seemed to him to be little less than a bit of sheer imbecility. Ten days! That was all, and yet they might have been ten months, or as many years for that matter, so completely had they changed him. He was not thinking of himself physically--not a day passed that Father Roland did not point out some fresh triumph for him there. His limbs were nearly as tireless as the Missioner's; he knew that he was growing heavier; and he could at last chop through a tree without winding himself. These things his companions could see. His appetite was voracious. His eyes were keen and his hands steady, so that he was doing splendid practice shooting with both rifle and pistol, and each day when the Missioner insisted on their bout with the gloves he found it more and more difficult to hold himself in. "Not so hard, David," Father Roland frequently cautioned him, and in place of the first joyous grin there was always a look of settled anxiety in Mukoki's face as he watched them. The more David pummelled him, the greater was the Little Missioner's triumph. "I told you what this north country could do for you," was his exultant slogan; "I told you!"
Once David was on the point of telling him that he could see only the tenth part of what it had done for him, but the old shame held his tongue. He did not want to bring up the old story. The fact that it had existed, and had written itself out in human passion, remained with him still as a personal and humiliating degradation. It was like a scar on his own body, a repulsive sore which he wished to keep out of sight, even from the eyes of the man who had been his salvation. The growth of this revulsion