The Kentuckian took his pardner's brown hand with a gentle solemnity, seemed about to say something, but stopped, and turned his bronzed face to the flood, carried back upon some sudden tide within himself to those black days on the trail, that he wanted most in the world to forget. But in his heart he knew that all dear things, all things kind and precious—his home, a woman's face—all, all would fade before he forgot those last days on the trail. The record of that journey was burnt into the brain of the men who had made it. On that stretch of the Long Trail the elder had grown old, and the younger had forever lost his youth. Not only had the roundness gone out of his face, not only was it scarred, but such lines were graven there as commonly takes the antique pencil half a score of years to trace.
"Something has happened," the Colonel said quite low. "We aren't the same men who left the Big Chimney."
"Right!" said the Boy, with a laugh, unwilling as yet to accept his own personal revelation, preferring to put a superficial interpretation on his companion's words. He glanced at the Colonel, and his face changed a little. But still he would not understand. Looking down at the chaparejos that he had been so proud of, sadly abbreviated to make boots for Nig, jagged here and there, and with fringes now not all intentional, it suited him to pretend that the "shaps" had suffered most.
"Yes, the ice takes the kinks out."
"Whether the thing that's happened is good or evil, I don't pretend to say," the other went on gravely, staring at the river. "I only know something's happened. There were possibilities—in me, anyhow—that have been frozen to death. Yes, we're different."
The Boy roused himself, but only to persist in his misinterpretation.
"You ain't different to hurt. If I started out again tomorrow——"
"The Lord forbid!"
"Amen. But if I had to, you're the only man in Alaska—in the world—I'd want for my pardner."
"Boy——!" he wrestled with a slight bronchial huskiness, cleared his throat, tried again, and gave it up, contenting himself with, "Beg your pardon for callin' you 'Boy.' You're a seasoned old-timer, sah." And the Boy felt as if some Sovereign had dubbed him Knight.