“Yes,” she agreed simply. Then her gaze was turned to the distant river where its shining waters could just be seen beyond the lank jack pines which surrounded the rambling house. “Perse is the brightest of the bunch. You know, Mum, it’s kind of queer us talking of the kids making good. We don’t ever stop to guess how they’re going to do it—away up here, thousands of miles from, from anywhere.”
Hesther flung a quick upward glance at the sweet weather-tanned face that was no longer smiling. She was wondering, for the girl’s tone had a note in it to which she was quite unaccustomed. In a moment, however, her eyes had dropped again to the thick patch cut from a caribou moccasin she was endeavouring to make fast to the child’s tattered pants.
“Trouble, Kid?” she asked, without looking up again.
These two understood each other. A deep bond of sympathy and love held them. The girl looked to this brave little widow of Jim McLeod for sympathy and comfort in her distress as a child looks to its mother. In affairs which needed capacity and strong execution the position was reversed. This girl of twenty, supported by the staunch Usak, strong in spirit and youthful optimism, wide in her grasp of the affairs of the farm, was responsible leader in all pertaining to their livelihood. Just now the girl was troubled and Hesther realised that the Kid had not abandoned her afternoon’s work at the corrals simply for idle talk at her doorway. Her interrogation was calculated. She wanted the girl to talk.
“Nothing worse than usual, Mum,” she said with a sigh. “It’ll be two years since Ben Needham went, come next opening. We’ve enough supplies to see us through six months. That’s the limit. Usak’ll be along back before the freeze-up. Well, things depend on the trade he brings back, and a winter trail to Placer. Do you get it? By next spring our stores’ll be run out. If he brings back good trade, and no accident happens along on our winter trail, we’ll be in fairly good shape for awhile. But it just means we can’t put in another season right through. I don’t see how we can, unless we have mighty good luck. The thing’s as dead as caribou meat without a market right alongside, like it was when Ben Needham was around. We’re right here beyond the edge of the world, and—and it can’t be done.”
“You mean—quit? An’ with the boys coming along? The twins are nearly sixteen.”
The mother laboured on assiduously. The busy needle punched its way through the tough buckskin with a sharp click as the strong fingers plied it.
The Kid glanced down at the bowed figure.
“The boys are good. Alg is a real man around the deer,” she said, with a shadow of a smile in her pretty eyes. “Clarence is hardening into a tough trail man. Usak reckons he’s a great feller to have with him. But it’s not that, Mum. It’s the trade these wretched Euralians beat us out of, and the distance to our market.”
“Is that all it is, Kid?”