For some minutes he was too intent on satisfying his ravenous hunger to indulge in conversation with his host, but as his hunger became appeased he began to give his attention to the man who had so mysteriously blown in upon him out of the blizzard. There was something fascinating about the lean, clean-cut face with its firm lines about the mouth and chin and its deep set brown-grey eyes that glittered like steel or shone like limpid pools of light according to the mood of the man. They were extraordinary eyes. Cameron remembered them like dagger points behind the pistol and then like kindly lights in a dark window when he had smiled. Just now as he sat eating with eager haste the eyes were staring forward into the fire out of deep sockets, with a far-away, reminiscent, kindly look in them. The lumberman's heavy skin-lined jacket and the overalls tucked into boots could not hide the athletic lines of the lithe muscular figure. Cameron looked at his hands with their long, sinewy fingers. “The hands of a gentleman,” thought he. “What is his history? And where does he come from?”
“London's my home,” said the stranger, answering Cameron's mental queries. “Name, Raven—Richard Colebrooke Raven—Dick for short; rancher, horse and cattle trader; East Kootenay; at present running in a stock of goods and horses; and caught like yourself in this beastly blizzard.”
“My name's Cameron, and I'm from Edinburgh a year ago,” replied Cameron briefly.
“Edinburgh? Knew it ten years ago. Quiet old town, quaint folk. Never know what they are thinking about you.”
Cameron smiled. How well he remembered the calm, detached, critical but uncurious gaze with which the dwellers of the modern Athens were wont to regard mere outsiders.
“I know,” he said. “I came from the North myself.”
The stranger had apparently forgotten him and was gazing steadily into the fire. Suddenly, with extraordinary energy, he sprang from the ground where he had been sitting.
“Now,” he cried, “en avant!”
“Where to?” asked Cameron, rising to his feet.
“East Kootenay, all the way, and hustle's the word.”