Grenfell, who did not answer, made his toilet by buttoning his jacket and stretching himself, after which he blinked at his companion with watery eyes.
“There are no marble basins or delicately perfumed soaps in the bush,” he said.
Weston laughed.
“I don’t remember having seen them at the muskeg camp. In the meanwhile, breakfast’s ready. I’m sorry there isn’t a little more of it.”
His companion glanced at the frying-pan.
“A scrap of rancid pork, and a very small flapjack—burnt at that! To think that human intelligence and man’s force of will should be powerless without a sufficiency of such pitiable things. It’s humiliating.”
Then, with a grimace of disgust, he stretched out his hand for the blackened pannikin.
“Green tea is a beverage that never appealed to me, and I feel abject this morning. Now, if I had a little Bourbon whisky I could laugh at despondency and weariness. That golden liquid releases the mind from the thraldom of the worn-out body.”
“It depends on one’s knees,” said Weston, with a trace of dryness. “Yours have a habit of giving out unexpectedly, and I shouldn’t like to carry you up this valley. Anyway, breakfast’s ready, and we have to find that lake to-day or give up the search.”
They set about breakfast, and again it happened that Grenfell got rather more than his share. Then Weston, who carried also the heavy rifle, strapped the double burden on his shoulders, and they started on their march, walking wearily. The valley that they followed, like most of the others, was choked with heavy timber, and they pressed on slowly through the dim shadow of great balsams, hemlocks, and Douglas firs, among which there sprang up thickets of tall green fern that were just then dripping with the dew. The stiff fronds brushed the moisture through the rags they wore and wet them to the skin; but they were used to that. It was the fallen trees that troubled them most. These lay in stupendous ruin, with their giant branches stretching far on either side, and, where tangled thickets rendered a detour inadmissible, it now and then cost them half an hour’s labor with the ax to hew a passage through. Then there were soft places choked with willows where little creeks wandered among the swamp-grass in which they sank to the knees; but they pushed on resolutely, with the perspiration dripping from them, until well on in the afternoon.