“Take it quietly! Oh, take it quietly!” Paul shivered. “I have known it a long time.”
Hours later they were still awake, the packer in his bunk, Paul in his blankets by the winking brands. The pines were moving, and in pauses of the wind they could hear the incessant soft crowding of the snow.
“When they find us here in the spring,” said the packer humbly, “it won't matter much which on us was 'Mister' and which was 'John.'”
“Are you thinking of that!” Paul answered with nervous irritation. “I thought you had lived in the woods long enough to have got rid of all that nonsense!”
“I guess there was some of it where you've been living.”
“We are done with all that now. Go to sleep,—Father.” He pronounced the word conscientiously to punish himself for dreading it. The darkness seemed to ring with it and give it back to him ironically. “Father!” muttered the pines outside, and the snow, listening, let fall the word in elfin whispers. Paul turned over desperately in his blankets. “Father!” he repeated out loud. “Do you believe it? Does it do you any good?”
“I wouldn't distress myself, one way or t' other, if it don't come natural,” the packer spoke, out of his corner in the darkness. “Wait till you can feel to say it. The word ain't nothing.”
“But do you feel it? Is it any comfort to you at all?”
“I ain't in any hurry to feel it. We'll get there. Don't worry. And s'pose we don't! We're men. Man to man is good enough for me.”
Paul spent some wakeful hours after that, trying not to think of Moya, of his mother and Christine. They were of another world,—a world that dies hard at twenty-four. Towards morning he slept, but not without dreams.