The man groaned, and finally opened his eyes and shivered. “Make a fire,” he said.
It was an unwritten code that whoever used the cabin would leave wood for the next comer to start a fire with, and Jimmy soon had a blaze crackling. Then, under the stranger’s direction, and with nothing more than a couple of splints torn from the bunks against the wall and some rags of elk-skin from the man’s coat, Jimmy bound up the broken leg.
A sickly light was coming in at the little cabin window by the time this task was finished. The wolves had not been heard again, but as Jimmy pushed the door open and looked out, he saw that the carcasses of the three dead wolves had been dragged away, leaving only the bloody traces of their presence in the trampled snow.
“I’ve a dead horse somewhere down by the branch,” the stranger said, “and a few rations. I don’t know if you could find the place.”
“That’s all right,” said Jimmy. “I’ve got some lye hominy hidden here, if no one’s discovered it.”
He pulled out the corn shucks that made a mattress for one of the bunks, lifted a plank and drew out a bag of corn. From the same recess he brought a long-handled spider.
“You’re mighty at home here,” the stranger commented.
“It’s the only home I’ve got,” said Jimmy, with sudden fierceness. “It’s mine.”
The stranger looked at him curiously.
“Well,” he said at last, “I’m mighty glad you happened along just when you did. I rode by here about sundown, and hailed, but there was no one here. Then my horse fell through a hole down by the branch and broke his neck and my leg, and it took me the balance of the night to crawl back here, only to get set on by those timber wolves. Law, they were famished.”