'And is there no cure?' asked Arthur, somewhat sharply.
'Peter Logan would scarify your foot with a gun-flint, that is, if the pain were bad enough. Do you feel as if the bones were broken, and grinding together across the instep?'
But Arthur could not confess to his experiences being so bad as this. Only a touch of the mal de raquette, that was all. Just a-paying for his footing in snow-shoes.
CHAPTER XX.
THE ICE-SLEDGE.
am Holt had long fixed the first snow as the limit of his stay. He had built his colossal shoes in order to travel as far as Greenock on them, and there take the stage, which came once a week to that boundary of civilisation and the post.
Two or three days of the intensest frost intervened between the first snow and the Thursday on which the stage left Greenock. Cedar Pond was stricken dead—a solid gleaming sheet of stone from shore to shore. A hollow smothered gurgle far below was all that remained of the life of the streams; and nightly they shrank deeper, as the tremendous winter in the air forced upon them more ice, and yet more.