“But the cow?” he hinted gently.
Oscar hesitated, then the grimness of his face relaxed and he smiled.
“They cared for Henderson’s stock after a fashion,” he said, “for they knew it might be a starvation winter for them otherwise. The calf they evidently did not want to feed and turned it out into the woods. When they feared that I would get some good out of it they came over to fetch it. But they went home empty-handed.”
Hugh had a quick recollection of Half-Breed Jake standing in the postoffice with the brown bear’s skin in his hand and of the shrinking claimant, Ole Peterson, slipping away into a corner. There were not many people, he thought, who could successfully dispute a question of ownership with the Pirate of Jasper Peak.
He had finished his breakfast and began to feel, once more, an overwhelming sleepiness. In spite of the brightness of the morning sun making squares upon the floor, in spite of the pressing nature of his errand and the mystery of the green forest outside, his eyes were dropping shut. One question, however, loomed so large in his mind that it must be spoken.
“I wish you would tell me, Oscar,” he said, the name coming as readily to his tongue as though the friendship were years old, “I wish I knew why you choose to live here all alone.”
The man’s face flushed a little under his sunburn and his blue eyes, once again, took on that stern look.
“It is too long a story, Hugh,” was all he answered. “Before I tell you about it you must have your sleep.”
The hands of the big Swedish clock in the corner of Oscar’s kitchen must have come very near to making a complete round before Hugh awoke. He had been dreaming so vividly that for a moment he was bewildered and sat up rubbing his eyes and wondering where he was. He remembered in a moment, however, and scrambled quickly out of bed. The cottage was quite silent save for the ticking of the clock and the crackling of the fire on the hearth. Hugh went to the little window at the foot of his bunk and looked out. When he had come up the trail that morning he had noticed little save that the hillside was steep and the forest dense, but now that he could see across the little plateau upon which the cottage stood and down into the next valley, he looked and looked again.
The country through which he had come on his journey from Rudolm had seemed to him all alike, one narrow ravine after another with close tangled woods, precipitous slopes and rocky summits in endless succession. But here he was looking out into a broad green basin where the hills drew back from the lake in a gigantic semicircle, leaving the half-wooded slope to drop gently to wide green meadows and a winding stream. Over to the north the hills closed in a little, but still left a broad valley through which flowed away toward Canada the river that was the lake’s outlet. Groups of trees extended downward from the woods and stood knee deep in the wild grass of the sloping meadows. A cheerful tinkle sounded below the cottage, heralding the fact that Oscar was driving up his cow from the luxuriant pasture land, to be stabled for the night.