“I examined you,” broke in the corporal. “I thought that you were dead!”
“But as you see I wasn’t,” replied the other, “and whilst I was lying there in the snow; Joe, who was waiting with the dogs, having heard the shots came to look for me. He carried me to the sled, took me to the woods on the other side of the river, made a fire, and having doctored me brought me along here. He’s a good sort is Joe, though his looks are against him.”
The corporal did not reply. From the trails he had found in the snow, he had already guessed part of the story which he had just heard and was not surprised at it. The wounded man laughed shortly.
“Joe is attached to me. I once did him a service, and if I told him to do it he’d run amuck through Regina barracks without demur. He doesn’t love the mounted police, as he owes his lost eye to one of them, so you will see, cousin, that only my family affection saves you.”
The Indian turned his scarred face from the stove, and laid the table in primitive fashion. Then having attended to his master, he placed a tin plate with moose meat and beans before the corporal, filled a mug with steaming coffee, and with a grunt invited him to eat. The officer did so readily enough. He had eaten nothing for fourteen hours and was feeling hungry.
“Plain fare,” commented his cousin, “but wholesome, and if one brings to it the sauce of hunger, it’s at least as good as anything we had at Harrow Fell.... And that reminds me, cousin. How is the governor?”
The corporal remembered the dignified Sir James Bracknell as he had last seen him, and although he had had his own quarrel with him, felt resentment at the tone in which the question was asked.
“He was very well when last I saw him,” he answered stiffly.
“How long ago is that?”
“Two years.”