"You're very kind," he said at last. "But I won't go. Tell her you didn't find me."
Bill straightened and sighed. "Make no mistake about that, Lounsbury," he answered. "You're going with me—" and then he spoke softly, a pause between each word—"if I have to drag you there through the snow. I was told to bring you back, and I'm going to do it."
"You are, eh?" Harold scowled and tried to find courage to attack this man again. Yet his muscles hung limp, and he couldn't even raise his eyes to meet those that looked so steadfastly at him now.
"Sindy can go home to Buckshot Dan. He'll take her back—you stole her from him. And you, Lounsbury, rotten as you are, are coming with me. God knows I hope she'll drive you from her door; but I'm going to bring you, just the same."
Harold's eyes glowed, and for the moment his brain was too busy with other considerations openly to resent the words. Then his face grew cunning. It was all plain enough: Bill loved Virginia himself. Through some code of ethics that was almost incredible to Harold, he was willing to sacrifice his own happiness for hers. And the way to pay for the rough treatment he had just had, treatment that he couldn't, at present at least, avenge in kind, was to win the girl away from him. The thing was already done. She loved him enough to search even the frozen realms of the North for him: simply by a little tenderness, a little care, he could command her to love to the full again. The fact that Bill wanted her made her infinitely more desirable to him.
"You won't tell her—about Sindy?"
"Not as long as you're decent. That's for you to settle for yourself—whether she finds out about her."
Harold believed him. While he himself would have used the smirch as a weapon against his rival, he knew that Bill meant what he said. "I'll go," he announced. "If she's at the Gray Lake cabin, we've got plenty of time to make it before dark."