It was natural that she should take pride in her husband's physique. His body was hard, lean, in the condition of an athlete's in training. Her fingers pressing his forearm made scarcely an impression. Once, as he bent to heave out of the way fallen timber which blocked the trail, she placed her hands upon his back. He turned his head.
"Lift!" she said, and beneath her hands she felt the long, pliant muscles spring and tauten and harden. On another occasion a bowlder had fallen upon the trail, partially embedding itself. It was possible to go around, but he would not. Finally he worried out the rock and rolled it down the hillside.
"Heavy?" she queried.
"Pretty heavy. The trouble was I couldn't get hold of it."
"Do you know how strong you are?" she questioned.
"Why, no," he admitted. "That is, I don't know just what I can lift, if that is what you mean, nor what I could pack for say a mile if I had to. There's a good deal of knack in that sort of thing—balance and distribution of weight, and the development of a certain set of muscles by keeping at it. There are men who can pack five hundred on a short portage. I've heard of eight hundred—but I don't know."
Faith thought she had known Angus before marriage. But in the companionship of the trail and beside the evening fires beneath the stars she learned that her knowledge of him had been superficial. She found that the country rock of his reserve hid unsuspected veins of tenderness, of poesy and of melancholy. But though he possessed these softer veins—and she reflected that it should be her task to develop them—the man himself was essentially hard and grim. His outlook, when she came to know it, proved primitive, the code which governed him simple and ancient—the old, old code of loyalty to friends, and in the matter of reprisals eye for eye and tooth for tooth.
"But that is not right," she urged when he had set forth this latter belief. "We are told to return good for evil."
Angus smiled grimly. "We may be told to do so," he said, "and we are told to turn the other cheek to the smiter. That is all very well when the evil or the blow is unintentional, sort of by accident. But when a man does you harm on purpose, out of meanness, the best way to show him he has made a mistake is to get back at him hard."
"Which makes him hate you all the more."