Long Houston waited for his return, but he did not come. The old, creaking clock on the rustic ledge ticked away the minutes and the hours until midnight, but still no crunching of gravel relieved his anxious ears, still no gigantic form of the grizzled, bearded trapper showed in the doorway. One o'clock came and went. Two—three. Houston still waited. Four—and a scratch on the door. It was Golemar, followed a moment later by a grinning, twinkling-eyed Ba'tiste.
"Bon! Good!" he exclaimed. "See, Golemar? What I say to you? He wait up for Ba'teese. Bon! Now—alert, mon ami! The pencil and the paper!"
He slumped into a chair and dived into a pocket of his red shirt, to bring forth a mass of scribbled sheets, to stare at them, striving studiously to make out the writing.
"Ba'teese, he put eet down by a match in the shelter of a lumber pile," came at last. "Eet is all, what-you-say, scramble up. But we shall see—ah, oui—we shall see. Now," he looked toward Houston, waiting anxiously with paper and pencil, "we shall put eet in the list. So. One million ties, seven by eight by eight feet, at the one dollar and the forty cents. Put that down."
"I have it. But what—"
"Wait! Five thousan' bridge timber, ten by ten by sixteen feet, at the three dollar and ninety cents."
"Yes—"
"Ten thousand feet of the four by four, at—"
"Ba'tiste!" Houston had risen suddenly. "What have you got there?"
The trapper grinned and pulled at his gray-splotched beard.