"It was very good of you to come across for us, and I am afraid you must be very wet," she said. "This is really a quite inadequate recompense."
Then she turned and left him with the pony, staring vaguely after her, flushed in face, with a big piece of minted silver in his hand. It was at least a minute before he slipped it into his pocket with a curious little laugh.
"This is almost too much, and I don't know what has come over me. There was a time when I would have been quite equal to the occasion," he said.
Then he turned away to the stables, where Jimmy, who came in with an armful of clothing, found him rubbing down the Cayuse with unusual solicitude, in spite of its attempts to kick him.
"I guess you'll have to change," he said. "Those things aren't decent, and you can put the deerskin ones on. The old man's a high-toned Englishman going camping and fishing, and, by what she said, the younger girl's struck on frontiersmen. When you get into that jacket you'll look the real thing."
Brooke had no great desire to look like one of the picturesque desperadoes who are, somewhat erroneously, supposed, in England, to wander about the Pacific Slope, but as he mended his own clothes with any convenient piece of flour bag, he saw that his comrade's advice was good.
When he entered the shanty Jimmy had supper ready, but he realized, as he had never done since he raised its log walls, the comfortless squalor of the room. The red dust had blown into it, it was littered with discarded clothing, lines and traps, and broken boots, while two candles, which flickered in the draughts, stuck in whisky bottles, furnished uncertain illumination. He had made the unsteady table, and Jimmy had made the chairs, but the result was no great credit to either of them, while nobody who was not very hungry would have considered the meal his comrade laid out inviting. Still, his guests had evidently no fault to find with it, and during it the girl whose pony he had led once or twice glanced covertly at him.
She saw a tall man with a bronzed face of not unpleasant English type, attired picturesquely in fringed deerskin which had crossed the mountains from the prairie. He had grey eyes, and his hair was crisped by the sun; but while he was, she decided, distinctly, personable and still young, there was something in his expression which puzzled her. It was neither diffidence nor embarrassment, and yet there was a suggestion of constraint about him which his comrade was wholly free from. Brooke, on his part, saw a girl with brown eyes and hair who held herself well, and had a faint suggestion of imperiousness about her, and wondered with an uneasiness he was by no means accustomed to what she thought of him, since he felt that the condition of his dwelling must show her the shiftless life he led. Still, he shook off that thought, and others that troubled him, and played his part as host, talking, with a purpose, only of the Canadian bush, until, when the meal was over, Jimmy, who felt himself being left out, turned to the guests.
"A little whisky would have come in to settle those fried potatoes down," he said. "I would have offered you some, but my partner here slung the bottle into the river just before you came."
There was a trace of a smile in the face of the grey-haired man, but the girl with the brown eyes looked up sharply, and once more Brooke felt his face grow a trifle hot. Men do not as a rule fling whisky bottles into rivers without a cogent reason, especially in Canada, where liquor is scarce. He was, however, both astonished and annoyed at himself that he should attach the slightest value to this stranger's good opinion.