Ned saw an opportunity to speak for Lenore, but Doomsdorf’s speech ran on before he could take it. “I don’t suppose you do,” he said. “Of course, I’m going to show you—nevertheless it would help some if any of you knew an otter from a lynx. You may not know it, but this island contains a good many square miles—to trap it systematically requires many lines and hundreds of traps. I’ve already laid out three lines—sometimes I’ve trapped one, and sometimes another. Two of ’em are four-day lines, and one a five-day line—that is, they take four and five days respectively to get around. On each one I’ve built series of huts, or shacks, all of them with a stove and supplies of food, and you put up in them for the night. They are a day’s march apart, giving you time to pick up your skins, reset, and so on, as you go. Believe me, you won’t have any time to loaf. After you get into the cabins at night, eat your supper and get some of the frost out of your blood, you’ll enjoy thawing out and skinning the animals you’ve caught in your trap. If it’s a big animal, dead and frozen and too big to carry, you’ll have to make a fire out in the snow and thaw him out there. So you see you’ll have varied experience.
“You’ll be away from me and this cabin for days at a time, but if you’re figuring on any advantage from that, just put it out of your mind, the sooner the better. Maybe you think you can sneak enough time to make a boat, smuggle it down to the water, and cast off. Let me assure you you’ll have no time to sneak. Besides, this patch of timber right here is nearer to the shore than any other patch on the island—you’d simply have no chance to get away with it. If you think you could cross the ice to Tzar Island, after winter breaks, you’re barking up the wrong tree too. In my daily hunts I’ll manage to get up on one of these ridges, and I can keep a pretty fair watch of you over these treeless hills. You’d never get more than a few hours’ start; and they wouldn’t help you at all on the ice fields! I trust there’s no need to mention penalties. You already know about that.
“And maybe you are thinking it will be easy enough to slack—not trying to catch much, so you won’t have many skins to flesh and stretch—maybe hiding what you do catch. I’ll just say this. I have a pretty good idea how this country runs—just how many skins each line yields with fair trapping. I’m going to increase that estimate by twenty per cent.—and that’s to be your minimum. I won’t say what that amount is now. But if at the end of the season you’re short—by one skin—look out! It means that you’ll have to be about twenty per cent. smarter and more industrious than the average trapper.”
“But man——” Ned protested. “We’re not experienced——”
“You’ll learn quick enough. Aren’t you the dominant race? And I warn you again—you’d better drop bitter tears every time you find where a wolverine has been along and eaten an ermine out of a trap!”
The man was not jesting. They knew him well enough by now; the piercing glitter of his keen, gray eyes, the odd fixation about his pupils that was always manifest when he was most in earnest, was plainly in evidence now. Thus it was with the most profound amazement that Lenore’s companions suddenly saw her beautiful mouth curling in a smile.
For themselves they were lost in despair. All too plainly Doomsdorf had merely hinted at the cruel rigors of the trapper’s trail. Yet Lenore was smiling.
Then Ned saw, with a queer little tug of his heart, that the smile was not meant for him. It was not a gracious signal of her love, meant to encourage him in his despair. A woman herself, and understanding women, Bess never dreamed for an instant that it was; she knew only too well the thought and the aim behind that sudden, dazzling sunshine in Lenore’s face. Yet her only reaction, beyond amazement, was a swift surge of tenderness and pity for Ned.
Lenore was smiling at Doomsdorf. She was looking straight into his gray eyes. Her cheeks were flushed a lovely pink; her eyes were smiling too; she presented an image of ineffable beauty. That was what hurt worse,—the fact that her beauty had never seemed more genuine than now. It was the mask of falsehood, yet her smile was as radiant as any he remembered of their most holy moments together. He had not dreamed that any emotion except her love for him could call such a light into her face. It had been, to him, the lasting proof that she was his, the very symbol of the ideal of integrity and genuineness that he made of her; yet now he saw her use it as a wile to win some favor from this beast in human form. The very sacredness of their relations was somehow questioned. The tower of his faith seemed to be tottering.
Yet he forced away the dismay that seemed to cloud him, then began to watch with keenest interest. Not even this man of iron could wholly resist her smile. In a single instant she had captured his mood: he was not so fixed in his intent.