midnight
He moved now toward the little isolated cabin , half hidden in its drift of snow , keeping well in the deep shadows of the spruce and balsam , and when he stopped again he saw faintly a gleam of light falling in a wan streak through a big hole in a curtained window . Each night , always when the twenty-odd souls of the post were deep in slumber , Jan 's heart would come near to bursting with joy at the sight of this grow from the snow-smothered cabin , for it told him that the most beautiful thing in the world was safe and well . He heard , suddenly , the slamming of a door , and the young Englishman 's whistle sounded shrill and untuneful as he went to his room in the factor 's house . For a moment Jan straightened himself rigidly , and there was a strange tenseness in the thin , dark face that he turned straight up to where the Northern Lights were shivering in their midnight play . When he looked again at the light in the little cabin the passion-blood was rushing through his veins , and he fingered the hilt of the hunting knife in his belt . The most beautiful thing in the world had come into Jan 's life , and the other lives at the post , just two summers before . Cummins , red-headed , lithe as a cat , big-souled as the eternal mountain of the Crees and the best of the Company 's hunters , had brought her up as his bride .