Murray took him in from head to foot without appearing to observe him. Nor was his regard untinged with envy. The youngster was over six feet in height. In his way he was as handsome as his mother had been. There was much of his dead father about him, too. But his eyes had none of the steadiness of either of his parents. His mouth was soft, and his chin was too pointed, and without the thrust of power. But for all these things his looks were beyond question. His fair, crisply curling hair, his handsome eyes, must have given him an appeal to almost any woman. Murray felt that this was so. He envied him and—— He looked definitely in the boy's direction in response to a rough challenge.
"Well—what is it?"
Murray's shining eyes gazed steadily at him. The smile so usual to him had been carefully set aside. It left his face almost expressionless as he replied.
"I want to tell you I'm sorry for—this afternoon. Darn sorry. I was on the jump with work, and didn't pause to think. I hadn't the right to act the way I did. And—well, I guess I'm real sorry. Will you shake?"
The boy was all impulse, and his impulses were untainted by anything more serious than hot-headed resentment and momentary intolerance. Much of his dislike of Murray was irresponsible instinct. He knew, in his calmer moments, he had neither desire nor reason to dislike Murray. Somehow the dislike had grown up with him, as sometimes a boy's dislike of some one in authority over him grows up—without reason or understanding.
But Murray's amends were too deliberate and definite to fail to appeal to all that was most generous and impulsive in Alec. It was impossible for him to listen to a man like Murray, generously apologizing to him, without going more than half-way to meet him. His face cleared of its shadow. His hot eyes smiled, as many times Murray had seen his mother smile. He came towards the stove with outstretched hand. A hand that could crush like a vice.
"Why, you just don't need to say another word, Murray," he exclaimed. "And, anyway, I guess you were right. I'd slacked on those pelts and knew it, and—and that's what made me mad—you lighting on it."
The two men shook hands, and Alec, as he withdrew his, passed it across his forehead and ran his fingers through his hair.
"But say, Murray," he went on, in a tone of friendliness that rarely existed between them. "I'm sick. Sick to death with it all—and that's about the whole of the trouble. It's no sort of good. I can't even keep my mind on the work, let alone do it right. I hate the old store. Guess I must get out. I need to feel I can breathe. I need to live. Say, I feel like some darn cabbage setting around in the middle of a patch. Jess doesn't understand. Mother doesn't. Sometimes I kind of fancy Father José understands. But you know. You've lived in the world. You've seen it all, and know it. Well, say, am I to be kept around this forgotten land till my whiskers freeze into sloppy icicles? I just can't do it. I've tried. Maybe you'll never know how I've tried—because of mother, and Jess, and the old dad. Well, I've quit now. I've got to get out a while, or—or things are going to bust. Do you know how I feel? Do you get me? I'll be crazy with six months more of this Fort, and these rotten neches. Gee! When I think how John Kars has lived, and where he's lived, it gets me beat seeing him hunting the long trail in these back lands."
Murray's smile had returned. But it was encouraging and friendly, and lacked all fixity.