The Honor of the Big Snows

In the days that followed, there came other things which Jan could not understand, and which he made no great effort to understand. He talked little, even to Cummins. He listened, and his eyes would answer, or he would reply with strange, eery little hunches of his shoulders, which ruffled up his hair. To the few simple souls at the post, he brought with him more than his starved body from out of the unknown wilderness. This was the chief cause of those things which he could not understand.

No man learned more of him than had Cummins. Even to Mukee, his history was equally simple and short. Always he said that he came from out of the north -- which meant the Barren Lands; and the Barren Lands meant death. No man had ever come across them as Jan had come; and at another time, and under other circumstances, Cummins and his people would have believed him mad.