“Eh—what? What did yuh say, officer? Break up——”
For a moment Bill was so amazed, so utterly dumfounded at this simple solution to his difficulties, that he could not find words to express himself.
“That’s what I said. Break up your partnership. Quit each other. Each go your own way,” elucidated the policeman.
It was an appalling thought. Unthinkable. Bill tried to picture a bleak pattern of existence from which Thomas had become erased. It filled him with a sense of loss so tremendously acute that it positively hurt. Little shivers of dismay ran up along his spine and seemed to settle there.
“Oh, Thomas ain’t so bad, once yuh get used to him,” he said. “Thomas got a queer way about him, an’ he’s cantankerous an’ stubborn, but he really don’t mean nothin’. Besides, I don’t rightly know what Thomas’d do after I left. He’s sort o’ helpless without me. He’s got so he sort o’ depends on me. Wouldn’t be worth his salt. I’d hate fer his sake——”
Thomas himself interrupted the conversation at this point by striding up with a huge armful of wood and throwing it angrily down upon the fire.
“Yuh can toast your shins now,” he declared angrily, glancing at Bill. “But next time it’s your turn.”
“Next time it’s my turn,” admitted Bill pleasantly. “I won’t ferget.”
“You’ll likely be asleep by then,” sputtered Thomas. “Great guns!—but ain’t that wind cold?”
“Winter’ll soon be here,” Bill croaked, humping up his shoulders and fighting back the smoke that drifted up around his head and into his eyes. “Six pounds o’ flour between three men an’ winter, an’ five hundred miles to the nearest tradin’ post.”