Everything except such articles as were likely to be needed for bed and breakfast was packed away in the wagon's bulging load outside. Bert reclined on a folding camp-bed. He was swapping portions of perfectly good eyesight for slabs of a horribly lurid novel. Brilliantly robed for sleeping purposes in a stunning suit of violet-and-white-striped pyjamas, with huge pearl buttons on it made from oyster shell, he presented a gorgeous appearance as he flipped the ash off his cigarette with the careless air of a rajah. In the adventuring line, he aped the splendour of the Count of Monte Cristo rather than the simplicity of style set by Robinson Crusoe.
Sam was scrawling a message on a picture-postcard—depicting a busy street scene in Regina—to send to his people in quiet and deserted London. Sitting cross-legged on three grey army blankets, which were spread out on the trampled grassy floor, he was alternately sucking at a stubby pencil in quest of ideas, and swearing softly to himself to aid him in putting them into words after he had trapped the elusive things.
Boots, belts, a dagger in a yellow leather sheath, outer clothing, and other odds and ends, were all strewed about with that delightful abandon so characteristic of young bachelors when separated from their sisters' habits of tidiness. Lending a sporting touch to the tent's somewhat bare interior, a double-barreled shotgun, loaded, leaned totteringly against the canvas, close to Bert's blonde head.
Being only the twenty-fourth of April, the night was cold. A frosted crescent, slender, chill, remote, floated majestically in the velvety sky, suffusing the world with a luminous paleness. A scarcely perceptible night-wind breathed softly through the camp. One by one the lights in the tents snapped out, the momentary after-blackness quickly dissolving in the pale wan light of the sickle moon. Here and there venturesome stars peeped out from the fathomless recesses of space.
Horses munched contentedly in the shadows of the schooner-tops—those with anything to eat did, at any rate. A cough, a ringing laugh, the fragment of a song, broke the silence at varying intervals. Now and again voices raised in sudden argument proclaimed to wakeful ears the universal clash of human opinions.
A dog barked; another answered the challenge; soon a regular chorus burst forth; then, after that died down, two or three competed for the last spasmodic yelp with a persistence worthy of something considerably more entertaining. Then silence again.
A horse whinnied; another squealed and fought its mate viciously, for even animals fall out with one another. Near Bert's tent, someone with a gift for dairying had acquired a blue-roan cow with numbers of wrinkles on its black-tipped horns. Nature's law of reproduction, working overtime, had decreed that this rather antique "bossy" should astonish herself by again becoming a mother. Begotten of old age, the calf was slightly anæmic, so when it discovered that it had been born among a horde of very green Englishmen, it quietly looked round, thought to itself "Hang this lot," then calmly threw back its head and wisely died—a sample of excellent judgment which by no means deterred the mother from uttering her lamentations in spasms of ear-bludgeoning roars whenever she remembered her loss.
Occasionally the camp was enveloped in a mantle of pure silence.
Ducks swished low overhead like flights of unseen arrows. Once, high up, wild geese flying northwards sunk their hoarse notes deep into the night's chilly vastness. An ox would inflate his body, stop breathing for a few seconds, then would exhale a long, contented sigh, followed by several blissful grunts as he resumed his placid chewing of a brand-new cud.
Distances wove themselves into a veil and hung mysteriously about the tented camp. A meteor streaked down the sky like a blazing spear. Frost with icy fingers slowly gripped the surface of the earth. Drooping tents tightened and stiffened, then stood glistening phantasmally in the ghostly light, their pale, thin shadows draping the ground in angular caricatures.