Ned looked up, and over the rafters, among other supplies, were laid a large number of small boards, planed smooth and of different sizes.
“I’ve shown you how to set your traps, for every kind of an animal,” Doomsdorf went on. “You ought to be able to do the rest. By the time you come around, we’ll likely have freezing weather—that means you’ll have to thaw out your animals before you skin them. If it’s a big animal, dead in the trap, too heavy to carry into camp, you’ll have to make a fire in the snow and thaw him out there. Otherwise bring ’em in. You saw me skin that otter I shot—skin all the smaller animals the same way. Simply split ’em under the legs and peel ’em out toward the head, as you would a banana. Of course you’ll spoil plenty of skins at first, so far as market value is concerned, but they’ll be all right for your own use. The closer you can skin them, the less fat you leave on the pelts, the less you’ll have to flesh them when you get to your cabin. When you can’t strip off any more fat, turn ’em wrong side out on one of those boards—stretching them tight. Use the biggest board you can put in. Then hang ’em up in the cabin to dry. A skin like a beaver, that you slit up the belly and which comes off almost round, nail on the wall. All the little tricks of the trade will come in time.
“Here and here and here”—he paused, to put in Ned’s hands a clasp hunting knife, razor sharp, a small pocket hone to whet his tools, and a light axe that had been hanging back of the stove—“are some things you’ll need. The time will come when you’ll need snowshoes, too. I ought to make you make them yourself, but you’d never get it done and I’d never get any furs. There’s a pair on the rafters. Now I’m going to tramp back to the cabin to spend the night—in more agreeable company.”
For a moment the two men stood regarding each other in absolute silence. Then Doomsdorf’s keen ears, eager for such sounds, caught the whisper of Ned’s troubled breathing. Presently a leering smile flashed through the blond beard.
It was as he thought. Ned’s mind was no longer on furs. His face had been drawn and dark with fatigue, but now a darker cloud spread across it, like a storm through open skies, as some blood-curdling thought made ghastly progress through his brain. At first it was only startled amazement, then swift disbelief—the manifestation of that strange quirk in human consciousness that ever tries to shield the spirit from the truth—and finally terror, stark and without end. It showed in the tragic loosening of every facial muscle; in the cold drops that came out at the edge of the brown, waving hair; in the slow, fixed light in his eyes.
This was what Doomsdorf loved. He had seen the same look in the faces of prisoners—newly come to a stockade amid the snow and still hopeful that the worst they had heard had been overdrawn—on seeing certain implements of initiation; and it had been a source of considerable amusement to him. This was the thing that his diseased soul craved. As the young man reached imploring hands to his own great forearms, he hurled him away with a ringing laugh.
“You mean—you and Lenore will be alone——” Ned asked.
“You saw the squaw start out with Bess?” was the triumphant answer. “But why should you care? It was Lenore’s own wish to stay. She’d take me and comfort any time, sooner than endure the cold with you. Of such stuff, my boy, are women made.”
The hands reached out again, clasping tight upon Doomsdorf’s forearms. Ned’s face, lifeless and white as a stone, was no longer loose with terror. A desperate fury had brought him to the verge of madness.
“That’s a foul lie!” he shouted, reckless of Doomsdorf’s retaliation. “She didn’t dream that you would do that——”