The first man explained.
“I bin campin’ way back there. The other guys who abandoned them claims played hell with the timber—gormandized the whole lot—must have gone in for the timber business. So I bin cuttin’ spruce up there on the hill. Wal, I often seen you drilling holes in this muck, but damn me if I ever seen your pard put a hand to the spade. He seems to live in that darned tent. 162 I seen him twice hiking out—to Dawson, for a jag, I guess. Didn’t seem on the level to me——”
Jim’s mouth twitched. He had no doubt about the veracity of this statement. Someone had been visiting Angela, and she had said nothing of it.
“Didn’t know he went to Dawson,” he replied evasively. “Thanks for the information. I’ll sure talk to him about it.”
They nodded and began to pole down the creek and out into the river. Jim sat down on a pile of muck and mopped his brow. The tent was approachable from the river on the other side of the bluff. The spruce-trees that surrounded it hid it from the view of one working by the creek, though any occupant would have the advantage of seeing without being seen. He remembered reaching the tent a few days before, to find Angela singularly embarrassed. Was that the day on which the stranger had called? Despite his heartache he could think no wrong of her. She was lonely, pining for the life she had left. Between him and her loomed an apparently unbridgeable gulf. If she had found a friend in that 163 mixed crowd back in Dawson, hadn’t she a right to see him and speak with him? His heart answered in the affirmative, but it hurt just the same.
He said nothing to Angela on the subject, but carried on with his thankless task, with a strange mixture of pride and jealousy eating into his heart. When more wood was needed he innocently(?) hewed down two spruce-trees in close proximity to the tent, whose removal afforded him a view of the tent entrance from the scene of his daily “grind.”
For a whole week he kept his eyes intermittently on the brown bell-tent, but the stranger came not. He wondered if Angela had become aware of the increased vision afforded him by the felled trees, and was careful to keep her strange friend away. He noticed some slight change in her disposition—a queer light in her eye and a mocking ring in the monosyllabic replies which she gave to any questions he found it necessary to put to her.
Their conversation had not improved with time. If he addressed her at all it was with reference to the domestic arrangements. She, on 164 her part, never interrogated him on any subject. Every movement of her lips, and of her body, made it clear that she regarded him as a complete stranger under whose jailership certain circumstances had placed her. Her determination was scarcely less than his own. She meant to break his stubborn spirit—to arouse in him, if possible, a violent aversion to her presence. Already the summer was vanishing. The few birds—swallows, swifts, and yellow warblers—that had immigrated at the coming of spring were preparing for a long journey South. Cold winds were turning the leaves brown, and the whole landscape deepened into autumn glory. Angela noted the change with an impatience that was evident to any observer.
Jim, testing the last few yards of claim, pondered over the problem of her change of front. She even sang at times, in a way that only succeeded in deepening his suspicions. Was she singing on account of some happiness newly found?—some interest in life which lay beyond himself and the immediate surroundings?
It seemed to be the case, and the consciousness of this disturbing truth caused him acute mental 165 agony. Some other man could bring her happiness. Some other man had succeeded in breaking into that icy reserve against which all attempts on his part had been vain. Was it worth while continuing the drama? If he let her escape, forgetfulness might come. Time had its reward no less than its revenges. Why suffer, as he was suffering, all the agonies of burning, unrequited love. At nights, with that hateful curtain between them, he had writhed in anguish to hear the soft breathing within a foot or so of his head. More than once a mad desire to rise up and claim her as mate came to him, only to be cast aside as the better part of him prevailed over these primal instincts.