WINTER was upon the cabin in the Gap. Through the long months much bitter knowledge had come to Callista. She found that she knew nothing a mountain wife ought to know. Finically clean about her housekeeping, she spent days scouring, rubbing, putting to rights and rearranging that which none used, nobody came to see; but she could not cook acceptably, and their scant fare suffered in her inept hands till she nearly starved them both.
Here, with some show of reason, she blamed her mother. Having never seen the time when she could go back to the Gentry place with a gift in her hand, she had not been there at all since her marriage. And here she blamed Lance. Between her incapacity and his earlier recklessness, they were desperately pinched. The season for hauling closed even sooner than he had feared. After it was past, he got a bit of work now and again, often walking long distances to it, since he had been obliged, as he had foreseen, to leave Satan and Cindy in the Settlement; and when the black horses came no more to the log stable behind the 183 cabin, Callista accepted it as the first open confession of defeat.
Lance was one who sought a medicine for his spiritual hurts with as sure an instinct as that by which the animals medicate their bodies, creeping away like them to have the pain and wounding out alone. With the first cold weather he was afoot, his long brown rifle in the hollow of his arm, tramping the ridges for game. The wide, silent spaces spoke restfully to his spirit. Half the time he left the cabin ill provided with firewood and other necessities, but he brought back rabbits, quail, an occasional possum—which latter Callista despised and refused to cook, even when Lance had carefully prepared it, so that the dogs got it for their share. The undercurrent of the material struggle to make a living was always the pitiful duel between these two, who really loved well, and who were striving as much each for the mastery of self, as for the mastery of the other, could they but have realized it.
In late November, the days began to break with a thin, piercing sleet in the air, under an even gray sky. On the brown sedge, dry as paper, it whispered, whispered through the clinging white-oak leaves, with a sharp sibilance, as of one who draws breath at the end of a pageant; for the last flickerings of the gold and glory of Autumn were gone; the radiance and warmth and beauty of life all circled now around a hearth-stone.
"If we get much more weather like this, I'll go out and bring ye 184 in a deer," Lance told his Callista; "then we'll have fresh meat a-plenty."
"Well, see that there's firewood enough to cook your deer after you've killed it," Callista retorted, resentfully mindful of Lance's having forgotten to provide her with sufficient fuel the last time he went on an unsuccessful hunting trip.
"You don't roast a deer whole," Lance told her tolerantly. "We'll dry some of the meat, and some we'll salt."
To Callista's exacting, practical nature, this figuring on the disposal of a deer one had not yet killed was exasperating. She wanted Lance to know that she lacked many things which she should have had. She wished him plainly to admit that he ought to furnish those things, and that he was sorry he could not. She had a blind feeling that, if he did so, it would in a measure atone.
"Well, it wouldn't take much wood to cook all the deer you brought home last time," she said with a little bitter half-smile.
Taunt of taunts—to reproach the unsuccessful hunter with his empty bag! Lance was not one to give reasons for his failure, to tell of the long, hard miles he had tramped on an unsuccessful quest. He merely picked up his gun and walked out of the house without looking to right or left, leaving his young wife breathing a little short, but sure of herself.