A sharp command and the traces were drawn taut. Another, and the journey had begun. The dogs, fresh from their week of idleness, strained at their breast harness, and the sled moved slowly, heavily over the dry bed of the forest. But it soon gained impetus, and the twilit shadows of the primordial forest quickly swallowed it up.
As the scrunch of the pine-cones under the steel runners died away the calm of ages once more settled upon the woods. The dying fire burned lower and lower, and the deathly stillness was unbroken even by a crackle of sputtering flame. The solitude was profound and full of melancholy.
The minutes crept on. They lengthened into an hour. Then far in the distance, it seemed, came the soft pad as of some prowling forest beast. But the pad quickly changed to the soft scrunch of moccasined feet, and, presently, a man, bearing a great load of wood upon his broad back, came on through the dusky aisles of the forest.
CHAPTER VII
DEAD FIRES
Tug did most things with a smile; but it was never the happy smile of a pleasant nature. Nor was it even a mask. It was an expression of his attitude toward the world, toward all mankind. His eyes conveyed insolent contempt; and his smile was one of the irritating irony and cynicism which permeated all his thoughts and feelings.
But his smile was for those looking on. There were times when another man looked out of the same eyes; a man whose cold heart loomed up ugly and threatening out of those deeper recesses of feeling which the shrewd might guess at, but were rarely admitted to.
Tug was a man whose selfish desire was above and before all things. He was of that temper which saw injustice and wrong in every condition of life obtaining, in every established institution of man, even in the very edicts of Nature. It was impossible for him to see anything but through the jaundiced light of his own utter selfishness. Every condition over which he had no control contained a threat, which, in his view of things, was directed against the fulfillment of his desires. He wanted the world and all its possibilities for comfort, pleasure, profit, for his own, without the effort of making it so; and had he obtained it he would undoubtedly have grumbled that there was no fence set up as a bar to all trespassers upon his property.
He detested the thought that others held possessions which he had not. But it was not his way to air his grievance from a personal point of view. He adopted a subtler course, and a common enough course among men of his class. He cloaked his own selfishness under a passionate plea for those others similarly debarred, railing at the injustice of the distribution of the world's benefits, and storming against class distinctions and all the lesser injustices which went to make up the dividing line between capacity and incapacity. In short he was, though as yet unprofessed, a perfect example of the modern socialist whose utter selfishness prompts methods and teachings which are the profoundest outrage against the doctrines of the Divine Master, who demanded that man should love his neighbor as himself.