When Hugh awoke his first thought was that it was a pleasant dream he had had of the storm’s being over and the stars visible. Yet when he sat up and saw bright sunlight pouring through the windows of the little cabin he knew that it must be true and sprang from his bunk with a hurrah of delight. The air was of a more bitter cold than anything he had ever imagined, the breath rose from his nostrils in two columns like steam and was frozen in white crystals all along the edge of the blanket where Dick still lay. Nicholas jumped down after him, shook himself by way of making a morning toilet and ran to sniff and snuffle under the door. There returned to Hugh a vague recollection of the sounds he had heard in the night, so that he undid the fastenings hurriedly and threw the door open. The dazzling sparkle of the snow almost blinded him for a moment, while the rush of intense cold made him draw his breath in quick gasps. Yet nothing could blind his eyes to what lay upon the doorstep—a big sack of flour, a bag of dried beans and the frozen carcass of a deer.
The sight of food when one is nearly starved has sometimes a strange and disquieting effect. Hugh was ashamed of the savage eagerness with which he fell upon the treasures and dragged them within. He kept thinking that they must vanish from his sight even as he held them and wished earnestly that Dick were not asleep that he might ask him whether he saw them too. It seemed too bad to wake him if the gifts did not turn out to be real. Yet the food remained very solid and genuine in his hands, even while he was preparing it for cooking and cutting off a venison steak. It afforded presently a perfume more delicious than all the sweets of Araby, when at last the meat began to broil. Nicholas lay with his nose almost in the fire, his eyes never moving from the feast as Hugh turned it over and over before the blaze.
“You are going to have the first one,” said Hugh. “You deserve it if ever a dog did. You are the only one of the three of us that has not grumbled.”
The second steak was nearly ready, flapjacks were browning in the pan and the beans had been buried in the coals to bake for another meal, when Dick awoke. Hugh laughed delightedly at the sight of him, sitting bolt upright among the blankets, his mouth and eyes both round with unbelieving astonishment.
“What is it, Hugh?” he asked, sniffing delightedly. “I could live on that smell for a week. Did the witches or the angels bring it?”
“I don’t know,” laughed Hugh delightedly, “but however it came, it’s real. Get up quickly or I will eat it all without you.”
They speculated long over every possible source for the mysterious gift, but could come to no conclusion. On examining the space before the cottage they saw that some one had come on snowshoes up the hill and had removed them to walk in the narrow trampled path that the boys had made, deep in the drifts, up to their door. They could see where the snowshoes had been stuck upright against a bank while the owner came up to the doorstone: the footsteps were short, shuffling ones made by moccasined feet.
“But no Indian man that ever I saw walks with such a short stride as that,” Dick insisted, staring thoughtfully at the marks in the snow, “and think what a load he must have carried!”
Hugh had a sudden rapid memory of two figures he had seen that first day he walked through the streets of Rudolm, a swift, silent Indian striding ahead and behind him his wife bearing just such a load as this on her bent shoulders and by the deerskin strap across her forehead. Yet he did not speak of the thought in his mind, it was far too fantastic and impossible.
They dined like lords that day, but spent most of the time still hugging the fire, for the cold was as fierce as had been the storm that went before it. The sun shone brilliantly, turning everything to diamond and silver and making their little world, as they looked out upon it, a strange and unfamiliar place. Jasper Peak opposite was sheathed in white from base to summit, with high-banked drifts and curving blue-shadowed hollows. The lake’s surface was blue again, an odd clear greenish blue, for it was ice. During the tumult of the storm it could not freeze over, but now was a glistening expanse, with white broken rifts here and there, where the floating masses of ice had been caught and frozen in. The long shore showed sharp lines of dark and white in its crowded pine trees with their burden of snow.