The cabin was a pleasant place. The walls were sheathed in red cedar, and there were fur rugs on the floor, red curtains at the windows. In the centre of the larger of the two rooms into which the cabin was divided stood the great iron stove, in winter the source of their very life.
Its voice filled the cabin with a roar like the forever unsatisfied roaring of the wind and sea—a hungry voice. Dorette swung open the heavy door, wincing from the furnace-glory within, as she flung on more wood. That was her one occupation until Garth came back—feeding the stove.
She went to one of the bunks—like the bunks of a ship—that were built on the wall behind the stove, and looked in.
Derek, her younger brother, lay there without sense or motion, as he had lain ever since the sergeant of police and Garth had carried him in and laid him there. He drowsed between life and death, shot through the body. Now and then he swallowed a little broth, but with no knowledge of the hand that fed him. She dared not touch him. There was nothing she could do for him but keep the cabin warm enough to sustain that flickering lamp of life till the doctor came, for the cold of that country kills like a sword.
Suddenly, clinging to the side of the bunk, she trembled. “If only you could speak to me, Derek,” she whispered. “If only I could hear your voice!”
But the only voice was the voice of the great stove.
Her mind painted for her the scene she had not witnessed—the hard men of the mines and the lumber camps, still men with formidable eyes, following Cain’s trail from Fort Dismay to Anisette; the end of the trail at a little lonely shack blinded in snow, ringed with watchful men; Derek pleading that Maxime might have “one more chance, boys;” the parley at the door, the shot coming from nowhere; men storming into the shack over Derek’s fallen body, and finding it empty; Maxime Dufour escaped again! She saw it all. Heard again Garth’s voice in hard-breathed sentences between shut teeth: “But he’s not goin’ to get away again. He’ll have to get food and shelter somewhere; and if it’s a thousand miles away, we’ll follow and shoot him down like the wolf he is!”
She glanced round, pale and shaken, thinking that still she heard that deep voice of bitter rage. But it was only the undertone of the roaring stove humming its angry song.
She busied herself about such duties as she could find. Twice she fed the stove from the pile of wood on the floor beside it. The fierce heat licked out at her each time, just as a savage beast will strike through the bars of his cage, and each time she shut the door with the sense of prisoning some lion-voiced living thing.
Her work was soon done. Everything in the cabin was tidied and tidied again. She glanced at the clock. Only an hour of the slow time had gone. Garth had only been gone an hour. She turned the clock with its face to the wall, took out a shirt she was making for Garth—red-and-black checked flannel, thick as felt—and stitched resolutely.