As soon as the meal was done she felt ready for bed. Bill ventured into the darkness with an ax over his shoulder, but not until his return did she understand his mission. His arms were heaped with fragrant spruce boughs. These he laid on the cot in the cabin, spreading the blankets he had provided for her over them. He placed the pillow and turned down the blanket corners.
"Any time you like," he told her gently. "Vosper is putting up the linen tent for we three men, and I'll build a fire in front of it to keep us warm while we smoke. You must be tired."
She smiled wanly. "I am tired, Bronson," she confessed. "And thank you, very much."
She didn't notice the wave of color that flowed into his bronzed cheeks and the strange, jubilant light in his eyes. She only knew that she was warm and full-fed, and the wind would bluster and threaten around her cabin walls in vain.
For a long hour after Virginia was asleep Bill sat by the fireside alone, his pipe glowing at his lips. Lounsbury had gone to his blankets, Vosper was splitting wood for the morning's fire. As often, late at night, he was held and intrigued by the mystery about him,—the little, rustling, whispered sounds of living things in the thicket, the silence and the darkness and the savagery.
He knew perfectly the tone and spirit of these waste places: their might, their malevolence, their sadness, their eternal beauty. He hated them and yet he loved them, too. He had felt their hospitality, yet he knew that often they rose in the still night and slew their guests. They crushed the weak, but they lent their own strength to the strong. And Bill felt that he was face to face with them as never before.
He was going to plumb their secret places,—not only for the missing man, but for the lost mine he had sought so long. He must not only fight his own battles, but he had in his charge a helpless, tender thing of whom his body must be a shield. Never, it seemed to him, had he met the wilderness night in just this mood,—threatening, vaguely sinister, tremulous and throbbing with impending drama.
"You've got something planned for me, haven't you?" he asked his forest gods. "You've got your trap all set, and you're going to test me as never before. And Heaven give me strength to meet that test!"
At that instant he started and looked up. The stars were obscured, the firelight died swiftly in unfathomable darkness, the tops of the spruce were lost in gloom. A flake of wet snow had fallen and struck his hand.