The snows above had lost their brilliancy, and it was dark below, when the teamster returned with several fine trout which he skewered upon a barberry stem. He also brought a deerhide bag from the wagon, and presently announced that supper was ready, while Alice Deringham, who long afterwards remembered that meal, enjoyed it considerably more than she would have believed herself capable of doing a few days earlier. She had travelled far in search of something new, and this was the first time she had tasted the biting green tea with the reek of the smoke about it from a blackened pannikin. Grindstone bread baked in a hole in the ground was also a novelty, and the crumbling flakes of salmon smoked by some Siwash Indian a delicacy, while she wondered if it was only the keen mountain air which made the flesh of the big trout so good, or whether it owed anything to skilful cookery.
There was also, by way of background, the glow of the fire flickering athwart the great columnar trunks which ran up into the dimness above her, and the cold glimmer of the snows with a pale star beyond them when the red flame sank, while the hoarse roar of an unseen river emphasized the silence. At first she felt there was something unreal and theatrical about it all. The light that blazed up and died, awful serenity of the snow, and the vast impenetrable shadows filled with profound silence, seemed all part of a fervidly-imagined spectacle; but as the silence deepened and gained upon her the position was reversed, and she seemed to feel that this was the reality, the environment man was created for, and she, wrapped in the tinsel of civilization, out of place in the primeval wilderness. Her father, immaculate as ever in his travelling tweeds, with his lean, pallid face, also jarred upon the picture, and Harry the teamster, bronzed by frost and sun, with the stain of the soil upon him, alone a part of its harmonies. They seemed no longer harsh and barbaric, but vast and subtle, and she felt she must go back to the simplicity she had laid aside before she could grasp their meaning.
It was the man who first broke the silence. "I was wondering if you would like a cigar, sir?" he said.
Deringham glanced at the Indian-wrought case, which was singularly artistic, somewhat dubiously, but remembering that something was due to their host, drew a cigar out and lighted it. He said nothing for a minute, and then turned to the teamster.
"Wherever did you get cigars of that kind from? They are far better than any I could find in Winnipeg," he said.
Miss Deringham noticed the man's eyes close a trifle, and fancied that very little would call the steely sparkle she had seen when the pack-ponies blocked the trail into them.
"Well," he said quietly, "a friend of mine sent them me, and I believe they came from Cuba. We don't raise cigars of any kind in British Columbia."
Miss Deringham saw her father's face, and felt quietly amused. He could, she knew, assume a manner which went far to carry him smoothly through discontented share-holders' meetings, but it seemed that the men who dwelt in the wilderness were at least as exigent as those who dwelt in London. Deringham, however, glanced at the speaker.
"The least said is often the soonest mended, but if you think——" he said.
The teamster laughed. "It should come from me, but the fact is I was worrying about that wagon and forgot," he said. "Now, if there is anything I can tell you about this country."