Carter's back was turned, the cook-house door had just closed on the last teamster, her father had gone back to his calculations, so her answer was sweet as satisfactory.
When, half an hour later, the four entered the cook-house, two cookees were laying the table under one eagle eye of the cook, the other being on a roast that he was liberally basting. "Hain't you got no nose?" he answered Carter's question; but he smiled as, sniffing its rich odor, Dorothy said: "It's venison! And I'm so hungry!"
"Sure!" he corroborated. "Cree hunter brought in a quarter of moose this afternoon."
Pleased with her discernment, he seated her at the head of a table which he himself had scoured with sand to a snowy whiteness while the cookees were grinding a summer's tarnish from iron knives and spoons. Her tin plate reflected a smile that he would willingly have paid for in turkey and truffles, but lacking these, he served baked potatoes with the venison, hot biscuit, cake a hand's-breadth thick, and with a flourish set the crowning delicacy of camp life, a can of condensed cream, beside her tin coffee-cup. Then he packed the cookees outside to peel the morrow's potatoes that her appetite might not suffer from their admiring glances, an act which they classified as tyranny and ascribed to evil motives.
"She's a right smart gal," he added, after imparting a few privacies anent their birth and breeding from the door-step. "None a' your picking sort. Knows good cooking when she sees it, she does." Then he left them to digest a last piece of information that the evolution of their ancestors had been arrested in a low and bestial stage.
That supper figured as an epoch in Carter's life, because it marked a definite conscious change in his feeling towards his wife. With all men thought is more or less chaotic. Filtering slowly from feeling under pressure of experience, it remains fluid, turgid, until some specific act—it may be of a very ordinary nature—clears and precipitates it into the moulds of fixed opinion. So, though material of a sounder, more reasonable judgment of Helen had been gathering in his mind these months, injured pride had held it in abeyance—in suspension, as it were—until now that recent disappointment had left him peculiarly susceptible to impression, a resolvent was added; that occurred which precipitated his thought.
It took form in Michigan Red, who entered with another teamster and sat down at the opposite table. The task that delayed them had sharpened appetite, and their attack on the food the cook set before them was positively wolfish. Using fingers as much or more than forks, they shovelled greasy beans into their mouths with knives, as stokers feed a furnace; and as they bolted masses of pork, washed whole biscuits down with gulps of coffee, Carter's glance wandered between them and the delicate girl at his side. Here, indeed, was one of the "points of contact" of her intuitive wisdom. Once before he had seen, realized it. But whereas he had thrust the thought away the night that he watched Michigan Red eat in the lumber-camp, he now gave it free admittance, mentally writhed as he realized how this and other gaucheries must have ground on Helen's sensitive mental surfaces. Fascinated by their gluttony, he watched until dulled eyes and heavy, stertorous breathing signalled repletion and the close of their meal.
On her part, Dorothy was quietly observing him. Given such knowledge as the Silver Creek teamsters had sown through the camp, it would have been easy for her to guess the rest—if his conduct had borne out her surmise. But he had learned so much and so quickly under the stings of injured pride that observation failed to reveal any wide departures from the conventional. She had to give it up—for the present.
"What a strange man!"
Her whisper dissipated his painful reflections, and, looking up, he saw that, after lighting his pipe with a coal from the stove, Michigan Red was surveying them with cool effrontery through the tobacco smoke. His fiery beard split in a sneer as Carter asked if he had finished supper. But he did not take the hint nor move when ordered to call Bender.