"Jim," she said, "if you think you kin, anyhow, git that Injun stuff, why don't you go and git it?"
Jim looked at her fixedly. Not before had he known that she felt the case to be so nearly hopeless. Despair took a grip on his vitals. A something of sympathy leaped from the woman's heart to his—a something common to them both—in the yearning that a helpless child had stirred.
"I'll get my hat and go," he said, and he went in the house, to appear almost instantly, putting on the battered hat, but clothed far too thinly for the rigors of the weather.
"But, Jim, it's beginning to snow, right now," objected Bone.
"I may get back before it's dark," old Jim replied.
"I can see you're goin' to lose the claim," insisted Bone.
"I'm goin' to git that shrub!" said Jim. "I won't come back till I git that shrub."
He started off through the gate at the back of the house, his long, lank figure darkly cut against the background of the white that lay upon the slope. A flurry of blinding snow came suddenly flying on the wind. It wrapped him all about and hid him in its fury, and when the calmer falling of the flakes commenced he had disappeared around the shoulder of the hill.