She thought that she heard him stifle a chuckle!
But, in this thickening gloom and through those heavy shadows which lay across her soul in an hour of doubtings and uncertainties, she could be certain of nothing.... He was saying merely:
"If you're not clean done in, I'd suggest you walk three steps into my cabin. On the other hand, if you can't make it, I'll pick you up and carry you in!"
At that she sprang to her feet; through the gathering dark he could feel the burning look in her eyes.
Then, groping mentally and physically, it was given to her to understand. For already he stood upon the rude threshold. She followed after him.
She gasped, astonished, when she realized that already, in so few steps, she had passed into the embrasure of four walls! Sturdy walls; walls rude and unbeautiful, but rising stalwart bulwarks against the cold of night mountain air. He, a blurred, gigantic form in the dusk, was before her; his wolfish dog was at her heels. She heard the scratch, she saw the blue and yellow spurt of a sulphur match. His form suddenly loomed larger, leaped into grotesque giganticness; the tiny room sprang waveringly out of darkness into the unreality of half-light; he found a candle; a steady golden flame sent the shadows racing into limbo; she looked about her wonderingly....
A room, bound in rough logs; a hastily, roughly hewn log set on other logs, offering its surly service as table; a stump which obviously made pretense at being a stool; a bunk against a wall, thick-padded with the tips from pines; a tin cup, a tin plate, an imitation of a box against a wall. And, hanging over a pole ... her first certainty that Bruce Standing, though animal as she named him in her heart, was a clean animal ... two or three blankets which, on last leaving this hut of his, he had stretched to air.... A primitive room, and yet clean. And, across from the narrow bunk, a deep, wide-mouthed fireplace made of big rocks.... He himself must have made that fireplace, for what other man could have lifted those rocks into place?
"I'm hungry," said Standing. "As hungry as a bear."
Already she was sitting on the edge of the bunk. She expected to hear for his next words: "Get me my dinner." But, instead, he said, his voice harsher than she had ever heard it before:
"And that's why I'm cooking for myself instead of making you do it! I don't want you to get it into your head it's because I'm getting sorry for you...."