The man had jumped on the toboggan and he was already being borne away, swiftly, by his team of wild shaggy brutes that seemed never to have known a weary moment in their lives. And she stood there, at the foot of a great blasted pine, terror-stricken, wondering what further torture of mind and body the world had in store for her.
But for that hut the place was a frozen desert, with no other sign of man. And she was alone––alone with him––and the fierce-looking dog was now running towards her. She leaned back against the tree, feeling that without some support she must collapse at its foot.
CHAPTER V
When Gunpowder Speaks
Hugo Ennis, a man well under thirty, tall and spare of form, with the lithe and active limbs that are capable of hard and prolonged action, had stood for a time by the tough door of his little shack. It was a single-roomed affair, quite large enough for a lone man, which he had carefully built of peeled logs. Within it there was a bunk fixed against the wall, upon which his heavy blankets had been folded in a neat pile, for he was a man of some order. Near the other end there was a stove, a good one that could keep the place warm and amply sufficed for his simple cookery. The table was of axe-hewn cedar planks and the two chairs had been rustically designed of the same material. Between the logs forming the walls the spaces had been chinked with moss, covered with blue clay taken from the river-bank, above the falls. Strong pegs had been driven into the heavy wood and from them hung traps and a couple of guns, with spare snowshoes 103 and odd pieces of apparel. In a corner of the room there were steel hand-drills, heavy hammers, a pick and a shovel. Against the walls he had built strong shelves that held perhaps a score of books and a varied assortment of groceries. More of these latter articles had been placed on a swinging board hung from the roof, out of reach of thieving rodents.
He had been looking down, over the great rocky ledge at one side of his shack, into the big pool of the Roaring River, which at this time was but a wild jam of huge slabs of ice insecurely soldered together by snow and the spray from the falls. Beneath that jumbled mass he knew that the water was straining and groaning and swirling until it found under the thick ice the outlet that would lead it towards the big lake to the eastward. Although the middle of March was at hand there was not the slightest sign of any breaking up. He knew that it would take a long time yet before the snows began to melt, the ice to become thinner on the lakes and the waters to rise, brown and turbid with the earth torn from the banks and the sand ever ground up in the rough play of turbulent waters with rolling boulders.
Yet the coming of spring was not so very 104 far off now and the days were growing longer. It would take but a few weeks before the first great wedges of flying geese would pass high above him in their journey to the shallows of the Hudson’s Bay, where they nested in myriads. And then other birds would follow until the smallest arrived, chirping with the joy of the slumbering earth’s awakening.
It was a glorious country, he truly believed. The winter had been long but the hunting and trapping had kept him busy enough. The days had seemed too short to become dreary and he had slept long during the nights, seldom awakening at the rumblings of the maddened pent-up waters or the sharp explosions of great trees cracking in the fierce cold. But he was glad of the prospect of renewed hard work upon his claim, of promising toil to expose further the great silver-bearing veins of calcite that wound their way through the harder rock. He knew that his find was of the sort that had flooded the Nipissing and the Gowganda countries with eager searchers and delvers, and created villages and even towns in a wilderness where formerly the moose wandered in the great hardwood swamps and the deer were often chased by ravening packs of baying wolves.