The man broke off and placed an arm about the woman’s shoulder.
“Say best run along, Hes, an’ see about food. I’ll ask him to eat with us.”
The wife needed no second bidding. She understood. She nodded smilingly and hurried away.
The two men were standing beside the counter. Jim McLeod had his broad back turned to it, and his fat hands, stretched out on either side of him, were gripping the over-hanging edge of it. His pale eyes were gazing abstractedly out through the doorway searching the brilliant distance beyond the river, while a surge of vivid thought was speeding through his brain.
Marty Le Gros was intent upon his friend. His dark eyes were riveted upon the fleshy features of the man upon whom he knew he must depend.
There was a silence between them now. It was the silence which falls and endures only under the profoundest pre-occupation. The store in which they stood, the simple frame structure set up on the ruins of the old-time Fort, which it had displaced, was forgotten. The lavish stock of trading truck, the diminished pile of furs. Neither had cognizance of the things about them. They were concerned only with the thing which Marty had told of. The desperate slaughter, the destruction of his Mission, seven days higher up the river.
After awhile Jim stirred. His gaze came back to the surroundings in which they stood. He glanced over the big room with its boarded walls, adorned here and there with fierce, highly-coloured showcards which he had fastened up to entertain his simple customers. His wavering eyes paused at the great iron stove which in winter made life possible. They passed on and finally rested on the simple modern doorway through which his young wife had not long passed on her way to prepare food. Here they remained, for he was thinking of her and of their baby so soon to be born. Finally he yielded his hold on the counter and turned on the man who had told of the horror he had so recently witnessed.
“It’s bad, Marty,” he said in a low tone. “It’s so bad it’s got me scared. Why? Why? Say, it don’t leave me guessing. Does it you?”
He looked searchingly into the steady, dark eyes of the man he had come to regard above all others.