He got up abruptly and walked into the cabin. When I followed, he was in his bunk, the blankets drawn over his head. A few minutes later, Joe came in. What sort of truce they had declared I never knew. Between them as men there was genuine liking. If that matter of a woman had stirred up feeling of any intensity between them, they were men enough to repress it.
So, for a matter of two weeks, the days marched past, filled with the monotonous labor of cutting and piling cedar bolts. The fall days were on us, with their long, gray evenings. My bolt contract was about done, and we took it easy, working short hours. The first man in kindled the kitchen fire, and also built another on the ground before the cabin door. When we had eaten we would sit outside under the projecting eave smoking our pipes before the cheerful crackling logs. It was pretty much as it had been before that night of soul unburdenings—except that we talked a bit less freely, there was more of constraint upon us.
Then one evening, in the first gray of dusk, when we had knocked off early and were sitting outside by the fire, watching the same tubby coaster that had brought Galloway to Coderre go lurching past Skeleton Point into the maw of Hell Gate, I heard the clatter of a buggy on the little-used road that ran between the landing and my camp. In a minute it gained the clearing. I saw the figure of a woman beside the driver. A few seconds later she was clambering out and walking toward us with a firm step. Norma Galloway, just as I recalled her, fair strands of hair wind-blown across her face, deep blue eyes shining, lips a trifle parted, her gaze fixed on Joe.
I turned to look for Broderick. He was all but behind the cabin, and he beckoned me imperatively. I followed. It didn’t matter, anyway. There was only one man looming before her, and he stood rooted to the ground as if he doubted the evidence of his visual sense.
Broderick strode along the cliff. When I caught up with him he was seated on a log, holding his face in his hands.
“You did write, And she came,” I said—for lack of something less obvious.
“Shut up!” he gritted. “I’m not in a talking mood.”
I don’t know how long we sat there. Broderick did not move, nor lift his head. It grew dark. I looked toward the cabin now and then, and once saw the fire break into a yellow gleam when some one stirred it.
“I guess all’s quiet along the Potomac.” Broderick lifted his face at last. “I’ve done my bit. Let’s go back.”
We walked slowly. Nearing the cabin and the soft glow before it, a stick broke in a shower of sparks and sent up a bright flame that threw into bold relief two figures—Joe on a block seat, his wife curled on the earth beside smiled up at him, and then at me. There wasn’t any further explanation needed.