It was near six o'clock when they returned to the little camp at Rainbow. Strong was not there, and after supper, while the dusk fell, they sat on a blanket by the fire, and Sinth raked the old scrap-heap of family history to which a score of ancestors had contributed, each in his time. It was all a kind of folk-lore—mouldy, rusty, distorted, dreamlike. It told of bears in the pig-pen, of moose in the door-yard, of panthers glaring through the windows at night, of Indians surrounding the cabin, and of the torture by fire and steel.
At bedtime Silas had not arrived. Sinth, however, showed no sign of worry. He knew the woods so well, and there were bear and fish and sundry temptations, each greater than his bed.
"Mebbe he's took after a bear," Sinth suggested, while she began to undress the children.
"You remember we heard him shoot soon after he left here," said Master. "It may be he wounded a bear and followed him."
"Like as not," she answered.
In a moment she put her hand on Master's arm and whispered to him.
"Say!" said she, "I don't want to make trouble, but if I was you I wouldn't wait no longer for that old fool."
She stalled the needles into her ball of yarn and rolled up her knitting. She continued, with a sigh of impatience:
"I'd go over to Buckhom an' git that girl, if I had to bring 'er on my back."
"That's about what I propose to do," said the young man, with a laugh.