CHAPTER V
THE CARGADOR
Kate's Narrative
It was sixty degrees below zero. The moonlight lay in silver on the pines, the hundred-and-four-mile cabin, deep buried among the drifts, glittered along the eaves with icicles, the smoke went up into the hush of death, and the light in the frosted window would glow till nearly dawn.
Within, Pete sat upon his shiny bench, rolling waxed end upon his shiny knee, and tautened his double stitches through the night, scarcely feeling the need of sleep. His new aparejos, stacked as they were finished, had gradually crowded poor Mrs. Pete into her last stronghold, the corner between the wood-box and the bunk. Fiercely she resented the filling of her only room with harness, of her bunk with scrap leather, which scratched her, she said. Wedged into her last corner, she would patch disgraceful old socks, while Pete at his sewing crooned One More River, or some indecent ballad of the gold mines.
"Mother," Pete would look up from his bench. "You mind when I brung her here right to this very cabin, with Father Jared, and the Baby, David?"
"What makes you hover, Pete?"
"D'ye mind Baby David?"
"Didn't I nurse him?" said the old woman softly. "He'd red hair like his stuck-up mother, blue eyes same as Jesse, and a birthmark on his off kidney. Now, did you ask her about that birthmark?"