"If you can fly," answered Bill. "Drifts is forty foot deep in parts, and soft too. I could hardly get on snow-shoein' it. Better stay and trap with me. Better'n gold-huntin' any time, and more dollars in it."

"Why aint you farther up in the hills?" asked Mac, as we tramped along.

"Dunno," said Bill; "I allers camp here every year. It's kind of clear, and there's a chance for the cayuses to pick a bit to keep bones and hide together. Besides, I feel more freer down here. I see more than 'ull do me of the hills walking the line."

And with that we came to his camp.

Now, if I tell all that happened during that winter, which was, all round, the most uncomfortable and most unhappy one I ever spent, for I had so much time to think of Elsie, and how some other man more to her mind might go to windward of me in courting her—why, I should not write one book, but two, which is not my intention now. Besides, I have been long enough coming to the most serious part of my history to tire other people, as it has tired me; although I could not exactly help it, because all, or at least nearly all, that happened between the time I was on the Vancouver and the time we all met again seems important to me, especially as it might have gone very differently if I had never been gold-hunting in the Selkirks, or even if I had got out of the mountains in the fall instead of the following spring. For things seem linked together in life, and, in writing, one must put everything in unless more particular description becomes tedious, because of its interfering with the story. And though trapping is interesting enough, yet I am not writing here about that or hunting, which is more interesting still; and when a man tells me a yarn he says is about a certain thing, I don't want him to break off in the middle to say something quite different, any more than I like a man to get up in the middle of a job of work, such as a long splice which is wanted, to do something he wasn't ordered to do. It's only a way of doing a literary Tom Cox's traverse, "three times round the deck house, and once to the scuttle-butt"—just putting in time, or making what a literary friend of mine calls "padding."

So folks who read this can understand why I shall say nothing of this long and weary winter, and, if they prefer it, they can think that we "holed up," as Mac said, like the bears, and slept through it all. For in the next part of this yarn it will be spring, with the snow melting fast, and the trail beginning to look like a path again that even a sailor, who was not a mountaineer, could hope to travel on without losing his life, or even his way.

PART IV.
LOVE AND HATE.

It had been raining for a week in an incessant torrent, while the heavy clouds hung low down the slopes of the sullen, sunless mountains, when we struck camp in the spring-time, and loaded our gaunt pack-ponies for the rapidly opening trail. Our road lay for some twenty miles on the bottom of a flat, which closed in more and more as we went east, until we were in the heart of the Gold Range. The path was liquid mud, in which we sank to the tops of our long boots, sometimes even leaving them embedded there; and the ponies were nearly "sloughed down" a dozen times in the day. At the worst places we were sometimes compelled to take off their packs, which we carried piecemeal to firmer ground, and there loaded them again. It had taken us but four or four and a half days to cross it on our last trip, and now we barely reached Summit Lake in the same time.

Yet, in spite of the miserable weather and our dank and dripping condition, in spite of the hard work and harder idleness, when wind and rain made it almost impossible to sleep, I was happy—far happier than I had been since the time I had so miserably failed to make Elsie believe what I told her; for now I was going back to her with the results of my long toil, and there was nothing to prevent my staying near her, perhaps on a farm of my own, until she should recognize her error at last. Yet, I thought it well to waste no time, for though I had to a great extent got rid of my fears concerning that wretched Matthias, still his imprisonment had but a few more months to run, and he might keep his word and his sworn oath. I wished to win her and wear her before that time, and after that, why, I did not care, I would do my best, and trust in Providence, even if I trusted in vain.