So little did she know of him! She did not see him remove his cap as he gently placed the luckless man in his last resting-place, or hear the short whispered prayer that he uttered.
The dogs were unharnessed and driven into the outhouse which was to serve as their future domicile. Jim collected the dead man’s belongings together and made a neat pile of them in one corner of the outer room. Angela’s personal things were taken into the more comfortable inner room, which boasted of a match-boarded wall—not to mention half a dozen rather indelicate prints tacked on to the same.
When he had occasion to go into the room again, after Angela had been there, he noticed that the prints had been torn from the walls. Angela was certainly very proper—for a married woman!
CHAPTER XIV
THE BREAKING-POINT
The weeks that followed were a testing-time for Angela. Her resolutions wavered and died, confronted as she was by the terrible isolation and loneliness. Stoicism was easy enough in theory but most difficult in practice. The unchanging icy vista and the eternal silence drove her to desperation. She tried work as an antidote, and found it dulled the edge of her despair.
They were fortunate enough to find a fish-trap in the outhouse. Jim regarded this discovery with great satisfaction. He chopped a hole in the river ice and, baiting the trap with a canned herring, managed to entice a “two-pounder” into the wicker basket. Angela’s attempt to cook it was not entirely a failure, and the repast was a pleasant change from the eternal beans and pork.