As they were eating their evening meal before a warm blaze, Neil said thoughtfully, “I wonder how this cabin caught fire. The fellows who camped here can’t have been gone long, yet when we came the fire was out and everything cold.”
“Yes,” agreed Louis. “Even the ashes on the hearth were cold.”
“Probably it broke out in the night,” Neil suggested. “Sparks from the chimney started it. But how could they, with the roof covered with snow?”
“If there had been snow on it, it would not have burned so easily,” Louis returned.
“This place is too sheltered for the wind to blow the snow off the roof. Someone must have cleaned it off. Perhaps the weight was breaking it down.”
“Well, it burned anyway,” Walter put in. “All we know is that there was a fire, and that some other party was here before we came. Do you remember those men we saw in the mirage, Louis?”
“Yes, we thought they were coming to the mountain. Whoever it was who camped here, we owe him a grudge. He burned our roof and stole our beds. Antoine and I made those beds last winter.” One of the first things Louis had noticed on entering the house was that the stretched hides, which had taken the place of springs and mattress, were gone from the rustic cots. The hides had been cut off with a knife.
The bed frames being of no use, the boys lay down on the buffalo robe before the fire. Louis and Neil slept soundly, but the pain in Walter’s feet and legs and frosted cheek made him wakeful and restless.
His lameness and his sore face kept him at home the next day when the others went out to seek for game and signs of fur animals. That was a long day for Walter. Enough wood had been cut to last until evening, and he kept the fire going. He cleaned out the remains of the burned roof which cluttered the floor, arranged the scanty supplies and equipment more neatly, drove some wooden pegs between the logs to hang clothes and snowshoes on, mended a break in the dog harness, and did everything he could find to do. The cabin had one window covered with oiled deerskin that let in a little light, and the open fire helped to illuminate the dim interior.
Dusk had come when the hunters returned, bringing two big white hares. Rabbit stew would be a welcome change from pemmican. They had set traps and snares, had seen elk tracks, and had found, among rocks at the base of a tree, a partly snow-blocked hole Louis thought might be a bear’s winter den.