“Helluva lot you care, you fat lobster!” Cleaver threw out at the slumbering man’s round, freckled face. “You don’t give a hoot about the prestige of the service, do you? Said you’d never make a dog man, and that goes! Blah!”
An angelic smile stole across the sleeper’s features. He rolled over lazily, grunting his contentment. Sergeant Cleaver snorted and stamped out of the cabin, crashing the door behind him.
Sergeant Cleaver shrugged his khaki service tunic up on wide shoulders, staring across the inlet at the precipitous coastline beyond. Already the brown hillsides were showing red where the lichens were commencing to take on their summer hue. There was a faint hint of green at the blue white glacier’s foot. A brilliant sun shone down out of an amazingly blue sky.
“Spring, all right,” he mumbled to himself as gray eyes roved over the ice pans and bergs tinkling together in the bay. “Another eight months’ winter over, and I ought to be tickled pink. Damn Scarth and his dogs, anyhow!”
The supply ship would probably be coming in another month or so, but he couldn’t go out on leave with all these sick and starving Eskimos on his hands, the sergeant ruminated, when his gaze swung about to the huddle of tupiks. Had to look after the poor devils somehow.
“I’ll make him feed those dogs, at any rate,” he said with sudden decision.
Quick fingers fastened the glinting brass buttons of the faded tunic, as soft stepping sealskin boots carried him downward in long strides.
A sudden chorus of expectant howls broke out from the watching huskies when Cleaver passed Scarth’s fish cache, and swung in at the trader’s open door.
The sergeant’s keen ears picked up a low whistle when he stepped into the post’s dim interior and stood, motionless, waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom.