Doomsdorf struck him off, hurling him against the wall; but it was not with the idea of inflicting punishment. Amused at his impotent rage, his blow was not the driving shoulder blow which, before now, had broken a human jaw to fragments. Nor did he carry through, hammering his victim into insensibility at his leisure.
“That gets you a little, doesn’t it?” he taunted. Ned straightened, staring at him as if he were a ghost. “Your sweetheart—that you’d sworn was yours to the last ditch! I don’t mean that she’d give herself willingly to me—yet. She’s just the kind of girl I’d expect a weakling like yourself to pick out—the type that would sooner go wrong than endure hardship. And that’s why she’s more or less safe, for the time being at least, from me. Even if Sindy wasn’t coming back home to-night—probably already there—you wouldn’t have to fear.”
Ned could not speak, but Doomsdorf looked at him with the fire of a zealot in his eyes.
“I don’t want anything that’s that easy,” he said with infinite contempt. “Sometimes the game is harder. I take back something I inferred a moment ago—that all women would do the same. The best of them, the most of them, still will go through hell for an idea; and that’s the kind whose spirit is worth while to break. Do you know any one who right now, likely enough, is trudging along through this hellish snow with forty pounds of traps over her back?”
Ned shuddered, hurling off his doubt, believing yet in the fidelity of his star. “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” he answered.
“That’s what Bess Gilbert is doing, and you know it. There, young man, is a woman worthy of my steel!”
He turned and strode out the door. Ned was left to his thoughts and the still, small voices of the waste places, alone with the wilderness night whose word was the master word of life, and with the wind that sobbed unhappy secrets as it swept his cabin roof. He couldn’t help but listen, there in the twilight. Thus the work of training Ned Cornet’s soul went on, strengthening him to stand erect when that stern officer, the Truth, looked into his eyes; teaching him the mastery of that bright sword of fortitude and steadfastness whereby he could parry the most pitiless blows of fate.
XXI
Thus began a week of trial for Ned. For the first time in his life he was thrown wholly upon his own resources, standing or falling by his own worth. Should he fall insensible in the snow there were none to seek him and bring him into shelter. If he should go astray and miss the cabins there was no one to set him on the right path again. He was meeting the wilderness alone, and face to face.
Cooking his meals, cutting the fuel and building the fires that kept him warm, meeting the storm in its fury and fighting a lone fight from the gray of dawn to the day’s gray close, Ned made the long circuit of his trap line. The qualities that carried him far in his home city—such things as wealth and position and culture—were as dust here. His reliance now was the axe on his shoulder and the hunting knife at his hip; but most of all his own stamina, his own steadfastness, the cunning of his brain and the strength of his sinews. And every day found him stronger and better able to meet the next.