When she had finished, breakfast, hot from the cookhouse, was brought by one of the “breed” women, and Miss Montell seated herself at the table and airily waved her father and myself to places on her right and left.
That was how I came to break bread with them a second time, and it was not the last by any means. In the ensuing five or six days I wore a distinct path between my cabin and theirs. Montell made it a point to descend upon me at some hour of the day, and, after all, I was not so loth. I am constrained to admit that Jessie Montell was the one bright spot in those dreary, monotonous days. With Barreau gone, I was a lonely mortal indeed. Those evenings at Montell’s passed away many a leaden-footed hour. After that first time Jessie never challenged me in that imperious, judicial manner, anent my Benton escapade. We spoke of it, to be sure, but in terms dispassionate, uncritical. When Montell was about, he and I played cribbage. When she and I were alone, we talked. We discovered a similar taste in books, a mutual acquaintance or two in St. Louis. And we gravely discussed the prospects of getting home in the spring. Naturally, she was a rabid partisan, hating the Hudson’s Bay Company with outspoken frankness. Moreover, she spoke confidently of her father’s power to beat them at their own game, notwithstanding the strong hand shown by the Company so shortly before. Of Barreau’s part in the war for pelts, she seemed profoundly ignorant. His name never passed her lips.
Once the swelling left my arm the torn place healed rapidly. So that by the end of a week I felt no inconvenience, and it was beyond need of any treatment save a simple bandage to protect it from the rubbing of my sleeve. Then I bethought me of my neglected snowshoeing, and sallied forth on the track of that free, effortless stride which had so far eluded me. At the gate of the stockade I turned back, on the impulse of the moment, and went to the Montell cabin to ask Jessie if she were a snowshoe expert or wished to become one.
“Thank Heaven for a chance to see the outside of this stockade wall once more,” she cried, in mock fervor. “Will I go snowshoeing? Yea, and verily. I detest being mewed up, and I don’t like to wander off alone. This big desolate country is so forbidding. Yes, I’ve snowshoed a little—one winter in the Wisconsin woods.”
She had more of a mastery over the webbed boots of the North than I, it shortly transpired. We went up the river a mile or two, crossed it, and climbed to the top of a bald point that immediately appealed to us as an ideal coasting-place. We were in something of a light-hearted mood, anyway, and like a pair of children on a holiday amused ourselves by sliding down and climbing back to slide down again. Thus we passed two or three hours, at imminent risk of frozen cheeks and noses, for it was bitterly cold, so cold that the snow crunched beneath our feet like powdered rosin. And when we wearied of that we went trailing home over glistening flats that lay between us and the post. Down on the bare bottomlands of the Sicannie a tenuous frost-haze hung in the air. Back from the valley edges the great woods stood in frozen ranks, branches heavy-freighted with the latest fall of snow. To the west towered the mountain range, robed in ermine now instead of summer purple; huge, ragged crests, flashing in the heatless sun.
“What insignificant creatures we are, after all,” the girl stopped suddenly and looked back at the white peaks, and to the north and south where the somber woodland stood like twin walls. “For a true sense of his own importance in the universe one has only to face—this.” She nodded toward the surrounding forest, and the Rockies crouching against the far skyline. “It is so big—and so silent. It gives me a feeling of being pitted against a gigantic, remorseless power—a something indefinable, and yet terrible in its strength. Power—when I can understand it—fascinates me. But this makes me shrink. Sometimes I actually feel afraid. They say that men compelled to stay up here alone often go mad. I hardly wonder. I don’t think I like the North.”
“So you feel that way,” I rejoined. “So do I, at times.”
She assented soberly.
“Perhaps we are blessed or cursed, whichever it may be, with too much imagination; and give it overfree rein.”
“No,” I returned, blundering on in an attempt to voice that which I had often felt, but could never express. “There is an atmosphere, a something about these immense spaces that sits hard on the nerves. We don’t have to imagine these things; they’re here. It seems to me that any wilderness untamed must have that same effect; it overawes one. And man hasn’t tamed this yet. The North is master—and we feel it.”