Wade did not wake when the cook’s wailing hoot called the camp in the morning. It was black darkness still. He slept through all the clatter of tin dishes, the jangle of bind-chains as the sleds started, the yowl of runners on the dry snow, and the creaking of departing footsteps. The sun quivered in his eyes when he rolled in the bunk at touch of old Christopher’s hand on his shoulder.
“Oh, but you needed it all, my boy!” protested the woodsman, checking the young man’s peevish regrets that he had slept so long. “Come to breakfast.”
Barnum Withee had eaten with his men, but he was waiting in solitary state in the cook camp, smoking his pipe, and moodily rapping the horn handle of a case-knife on the table.
“Law says,” he remarked to his guests, continuing aloud his meditations, “that employer shall send out remains of them that die in camp. But I ain’t employer in this case, and I’m short of hosses, anyway, and the tote team only came in yesterday, and ain’t due to go out again for a week.”
“It makes a lot of trouble, old critters dyin’ that ain’t got friends,” observed Christopher, spooning out beans.
“You may mean that sarcastic, but it’s the truth just the same,” retorted Withee. “He ain’t northin’ to me. What I was thinkin’ of, if you were bound out—”
“Ain’t goin’ that way,” said the woodsman, giving Wade a significant glance.
“Well, from what things you let drop last night,” grumbled the operator, “I figured that you were more or less interested in old Lane, and perhaps were lookin’ him up for somethin’, and if so you ought to be willin’ to help get him out and buried in a cemetery. He ain’t a friend of mine and never was, and it ain’t square to have the whole thing dumped onto me.”
Wade, his heart made tender by his own grief, gazed towards the lonesome isolation of the lean-to with moistening eyes. Alone, living; alone, dead! But Christopher put into cold phrase the burning fact they had to face.