Alton nodded. "You'll not forget again. The man is a kinsman of mine."
Seaforth smote the pack-horse, because he did not quite know what to answer. He had vague suspicions concerning Deringham, but was quite aware that it would be inappropriate for him to express them. Also, having seen a little of the smoother side of life in England, he knew a trifle more about young women of Miss Deringham's description than his comrade did. He admired the girl, as most men would have done, but the qualities Alton had evidently endowed her with were not especially apparent to him. He also fancied that Miss Deringham would have found some of them distinctly irksome now and then.
It was dark when they came out of the brulee and pitched camp amidst the boulders beside a lonely lake. The mists crawled about the pines that shut it in, and its surface was seamed with white by a little bitter wind. Sombre clouds rolled lower down the surrounding hills, and Seaforth was glad to stretch his weary limbs under the lee of a big boulder while the fire snapped and crackled in front of him.
"I wonder when we shall see this lake again," he said.
Alton, who was busy with the frypan, turned and stirred the fire, and the sparks and smoke whirled about them before a stinging blast. "I don't know," he said, glancing at a smear of whiteness that swept athwart the lake. "It depends upon the weather, and I'm not pleased with that to-night. You see the Chinook winds would keep off the snow."
"Of course," said Seaforth, who knew that the warm breezes from the Pacific occasionally drive back the rigorous winter that turns the northern portion of the mountain province into a white desolation. "They usually do, but we'll surmise that in place of them we get the back-draughts from the Pole?"
"Then," said Alton dryly, "it would be a good deal nicer down at
Somasco. Are you sorry you didn't stop there, Charley?"
Seaforth threw an armful of fir wood upon the fire with somewhat unnecessary violence. "You are not so pleasant as you might be to-night," he said.
Alton rose and stretched himself. "I wouldn't worry about me. It seems to me we are both of us feeling lonely, and that's curious, because when we had him Okanagan wasn't any special kind of a companionable man. There was a time when you would have been driving to dinner with a diamond pin stuck in you and silk stockings on about this time, Charley?"
Seaforth laughed. "I scarcely think either of the things are in common masculine use," he said. "There, however, was a time when I walked into a British Columbian mining camp with my whole wardrobe on my back and, I think, fifty cents in my pocket. Still, what you ask me suggests a not quite unwarranted question. What are you going to do with Carnaby, Harry?"