As long as the sunlight lasted the three kept up their spirits fairly well. The glades in their winter dress, with the sunlight gleaming upon the dazzling snow and flashing from the white plumes of the pines, were cheery enough, and took Corbett's thoughts back to Christmas in the old country; besides, there were great tracks across one glade—tracks like the tracks of a cow, and Ned was interested in recognizing the footprints of the beast which has given its name to Cariboo.
But when the sun went, everything changed. A great gloom fell like a pall upon man and nature: the glitter which made a gem of every lakelet was gone, and the swamps, which had looked like the homes of an ideal Father Christmas, relapsed into dim shadowy places over whose soft floors murder might creep unheard, whilst the balsam pines stood rigid and black, like hearse plumes against the evening sky.
"Ned, we can't get out of this confounded mountain to-night, can we?" asked Chance.
"No, old man, I don't think we can," replied Ned, straining his eyes along the trail, which still led upwards.
"Then I propose that we camp;" and Chance suited the action to the word, by heaving his pack off his shoulders and dropping on to it with a sigh of relief.
Perhaps the three sat in silence for five minutes (it certainly was not more), asking only for leave to let the aching muscles rest awhile; though even this seemed too much to ask, for long before their muscles had ceased to throb, before Steve's panting breath had begun to come again in regular cadence, the chill of a winter night took hold upon them, stiffened their clothes, and would shortly have frozen them to their seats.
"This is deuced nice for May, isn't it, Steve?" remarked Ned with a shiver. "Lend me the axe, Phon; it is in your pack. If we don't make a fire we shall freeze before morning. Steve, you might cut some brush, old chap, and you and Phon might beat down some of the snow into a floor to camp on. I'll go and get wood enough to last all night;" and Corbett walked off to commence operations upon a burnt "pine stick," still standing full of pitch and hard as a nail. But Ned was used to his axe, and the cold acted on him as a spur to a willing horse, so that he hewed away, making the chips fly and the axe ring until he had quite a stack of logs alongside the shelter which Steve had built up.
Then the sticks began to crackle and snap like Chinese fireworks, and the makers of the huge fire were glad enough to stand at a respectful distance lest their clothes should be scorched upon their backs. That is the worst of a pine fire. It never gives out a comfortable glow, but either leaves you shivering or scorches you.
Having toasted themselves on both sides, the three travellers found a place where they would be safe from the wood smoke, and still standing pulled out the rations set apart for the first day's supper, and ate the cold bacon and heavy damper slowly, knowing that there was no second course coming.
When you are reduced to two slices of bread and one of bacon for a full meal, with only two such meals in the day, and twelve hours of abstinence and hard labour between them, it is wonderful how even coarse store bacon improves in flavour. I have even known men who would criticise the cooking at a London club, to collect the stale crumbs from their pockets and eat them with apparent relish in the woods, though the crumbs were thick with fluff and tobacco dust! As they stood there munching, Ned said: