"What are you thinking about, Jim?" she asked.
"I was wondering how we would have got on if we hadn't brought you," he replied.
Carrie laughed. "I know. Yet you wanted to leave me!"
"If I did, I was a fool."
"No," said Carrie, thoughtfully, "you are not a fool, but sometimes you're rather dull. Now you're half asleep and had better go to bed."
Jim knocked out his pipe and went.
A few days afterwards he started for the settlement with two of his men. They were good workmen and Jake was unwilling to let them go, but they had been with Jim in the North and he needed helpers whom he could trust, for he was going to make a bold experiment. He needed food, powder, and tools, and it was hard to keep the camp supplied. Pack-horses could not carry much over the mountain-trail and the freighters' charges were high. Jim imagined he could bring up the goods cheaper by canoe, although the plan had drawbacks.
He reached the settlement, and after waiting a few days sat one evening on the hotel veranda. Burned matches and cigar-ends lay about the dirty boards; the windows of the mean ship-lap house were guarded by fine wire net. The door had been removed, and a frame, filled in with gauze and held by a spring, slammed noisily when one went in or out. For all that, the hotel was full of dust and flies, and mosquitoes hummed about the hot rooms at night. The snow had melted below the timber line and a long trail of smoke floated across the somber forest. A fire was working through the trees and a smell of burning came down the valley.
Three or four men in ragged overalls lounged about the veranda, and the landlord leaned against a post. He wore a white shirt with gold studs, and his clothes were good.
"Now you have got your truck, I reckon you'll pull out," he remarked.