“It is clearing, and I have faced worse weather,” he answered briefly. He was so eager to be gone that Pam could not insist on his staying longer, especially as Sophy was curiously silent on the matter.
Mose was quite right. The gloom was lifting and the snowfall was thinner when he opened the door, and, shutting it with a bang, disappeared from view. Not a cent would he accept for the work he had done, though Pam had begged him to take some money, if only to pay for the time he had wasted on her and the dog. He warned Pam to keep to the house for a day or two, until the lynxes were either killed or driven away from the neighbourhood, and then he was gone.
“It is dreadful to have him go like that, for I know he is badly hurt, and he saved my life twice over. If I had escaped the lynx, I certainly should have perished in the snow, it is so bewildering.” Pam was distinctly tearful, for she was shaken by the nerve-wracking experience she had gone through.
“Fancy Mose Paget turning out like that!” cried Sophy. “I thought he was bad all through.”
“Even the worst people have streaks of good in places,” answered Pam.
CHAPTER IX
Making the Best of It
Quite a wave of excitement spread over the neighbourhood when the news of Pam’s encounter with the lynxes got abroad. Hunting parties were organized, and enthusiastic young men spent nights of watching in the forest. When Nathan Gittins had three sheep mauled the excitement grew to fever heat, everything else was let slide, and the district rose as one man to rid the place of such a serious menace to property.
During these days neither Pam nor Sophy went beyond the few cleared fields surrounding Ripple. Kindly neighbours visited them at intervals of every two or three days to see that they wanted for nothing, bring their mail, and take letters to post for them. The Doctor rode in that direction when he had patients anywhere near, and Don showed a brotherly devotion that set up some private wonders in the mind of Sophy. Of course he had always been kind to her, and better than most brothers; but she argued to herself that his conduct now was not according to nature, and she was shrewd enough to guess that she was not the chief reason of his many journeys across the forest from his father’s house at The Corner. The Doctor lived at The Corner because it was the middle of everything; and although it appeared to be misnamed, it had really been so called because it stood at the angle or corner of the hill, just where the creek went tearing down through a wooded defile to join the river a little below Hunt’s Crossing.