“I guess that’s the proper card,” he uttered at last. “I can make it back, all right, if it does come bad weather. I got to get her home, that’s sure. You can kinda keep out of sight till we get started, can’t you, George?”
“That’s as it happens,” Barreau returned indifferently. “Meantime, have you grub-staked any of these hunters? Are the Indians beginning to come in?”
Montell nodded. “Quite a few. Two or three camps up the river, the boys say. Some of ’em wouldn’t make no deal till you showed up. Don’t you let none of ’em have too big a debt, George.”
Barreau shrugged his shoulders at this last caution. He sat staring into the fire, his lean, dark face touched with its red glow. Then abruptly he got up and opened the door.
“It’s dark, Bob,” he said to me. “Let us go to the cabin.” And without another word to Montell he left the store, I following.
It was just dark enough so that we could distinguish the outline of the post buildings, and the black, surrounding wall of the stockade. The burned stable had been rebuilt during our absence. Within it horses sneezed and coughed over their fodder. On the flat beyond the post I could hear the night-herder whistle as he rode around the grazing mules. From this window and that, lights shone mistily through the scraped-and-dried deer-skin that served for glass. And at the far end of the stockade a group of men chattered noisily about a roaring fire. Yet the lights and sounds, the buildings of men and the men themselves seemed inconsequential, insignificant, proportioned to their surroundings like the cheeping of a small frog at the bottom of a deep well. The close-wrapping wilderness, with its atmosphere of inexorable solitude, enfolded us with silence infinitely more disturbing than any clamor. It may have been my mood, that night, but it seemed a drear and lonely land; the bigness of the North, its power, the implacable, elemental forces, had never taken definite form before. Now, all at once, I saw them, and I did not like the sight.
We did not make our way straight to the cabin. Barreau had no mind to go hungry. He stopped at the mess-house and bade the cook send our supper to us, when it was ready. Then we went to the cabin, flung our lean packs in a corner, built a fire, and sat by it smoking till a voluble Frenchman brought the warm food.
Again Barreau had fallen into wordless brooding. For the hour or more that passed after we had eaten he lay on his bed staring at the pole-and-dirt roof. He was still stretched thus, an unlighted cigarette between his lips, when I took off my clothes and laid me down to sleep. And when at daybreak I wakened and sat up sleepily, Barreau’s bedding was neatly smoothed out on the bunk. His smoking material, which had lain on the table, was gone; likewise his rifle, cartridge-belt, and the pack-rigging he had cast aside the evening before. It seemed that Mr. Barreau must have gone a-journeying.
I opened the door and looked about me. Here and there men busied themselves at sundry occupations. The sun had but cleared the tree-tops, and on flat and hillsides deep black shadows still nestled. My roving eyes finally settled on one of these blots of shade, and presently I saw four figures, mounted, two of them leading extra horses, ascending the south bank. Looking more closely I observed that one was a woman. Mr. Montell, I decided, was taking time by the forelock. I stood with hands jammed in my trousers pockets, wishing that I, too, were homeward bound, wondering if Bolton had got either of my letters, and if he had made any attempt to trace me—and a lot of other footless speculation.