“Yes—I must have been. He says I was calling for Pierre, and Pierre was dead. I left him ten miles back there in the snow.” He closed his eyes with a groan of pain and continued, after a moment, “Pierre and I have been trapping foxes. We were coming back with supplies to last us until late spring when—it happened. The white man's name is Dobson, and there's a breed with him. Their shack is six or seven miles up the creek.”
Philip saw the doctor examining a revolver which he had taken from the pocket of his big coat. He came over to the bunkside with it in his hand.
“That's enough, Phil,” he said softly. “He must not talk any more for an hour or two or we'll have him in a fever. Get on your coat. I'm going with you.”
“I'm going alone,” said Phil shortly. “You attend to your patient.” He drank a cup of coffee, ate a piece of toasted bannock, and with the first gray breaking of dawn started up the creek on a pair of Pierre's old snow-shoes. The doctor followed him to the creek and watched him until he was out of sight.
The wounded man was sitting on the edge of the cot when McGill reentered the cabin.
His exertion had brought a flush of color back into his face, which lighted up with a smile as the other came through the door.
“It was a close shave, thanks to you,” he said, repeating Philip's words.
“Just so,” replied the doctor. He had placed a brace of short bulldog revolvers on the table and offered one of them now to his companion.
“The shaving isn't over yet, Falkner.”
They ate breakfast, each with a gun beside his tin plate. Now and then the doctor interrupted his meal to go to the door and peer over the broadening vista of the barrens. They had nearly finished when he came back from one of these observations, his lips set a little tighter, a barely perceptible tremor in his voice when he spoke.