Full of aches and pains (and that was all!) they had passed a bad night, so that this morning they really had been glad to stagger up and out again, into the bleak whity-gray, even though they might be starting upon only another long day of fruitless tramping.
Baroney groaned.
“Ma foi! My legs move, my head thinks, but there is nothing between. I have no stomach.”
“We’ll find meat to-day. Not only for ourselves but for the boys in camp, remember,” encouraged the doctor. “They’re likely depending on us, for we’ve heard no gunshots. We must separate and hunt widely.”
They had trudged forth, before sun-up. They had crossed the first wooded ridge, to the next little valley.
“Stub, you follow up, along the high ground on this side,” the doctor ordered. “Baroney will take the middle. I’ll take the farther side. Move slowly and all together, and we’ll surely start something. Head off anything that comes your way, Stub, and drive it down to us. Don’t waste the load in your pistol.”
“Yes, I will drive,” answered Stub, patiently.
He waited, shivering, until Baroney had halted in the bottom, and the doctor had toiled clear across to the other slope, and up. Then they three moved on together—one searching either flank, the third in between.
The valley was not wide. Its bottom was level and open except for the snow-covered brush; its sides were dotted with cedars and pines. Keeping near the top of his side, so as to drive anything down hill, Stub hunted faithfully, hoping, too, that he would hear the doctor or Baroney shoot. His eyes scanned every foot before and to right and left, seeking tracks. Even a rabbit would be welcomed—yet he didn’t wish to spend his bullet on a rabbit.
He saw nothing to make him draw his pistol. It weighed heavily and rasped his stomach and thigh as he plodded on.