“Nothing much. Take a heap more’n that to kill a tough timberjack like me. Scratched me with his claws, the ornery beast!”
“We’d better tend to it anyway.”
“All right.”
“Bounty on him,” Jim added, poking his foot at the dead wolf. “Twenty dollars or more. Right enough, too. Destroyer he is. Kills everything from pretty white ptarmigan to the lambs people try to raise further south.”
Back at the cook-shack Joyce bathed his wounded hand, applied iodine, then bound it up. And all the time she was thinking to herself, “It can’t be Jim. True courage and a feeling for others, even dumb animals, does not go with a dishonest heart.”
But if Jim had not stolen the films that had cost so much and might mean a fortune to some one, who had? Ah, well, there was time enough to think of that. Now she must finish preparing supper. The others would be in very soon.
* * * * * * * *
In the meantime there was cause for excitement in Johnny Thompson’s camp. Scarcely had Johnny arrived when Sandy MacDonald, a bearded giant of a prospector, came tramping in. Over his back he carried a load that would have broken the back of a slighter man.
“That,” he declared as he dropped the sack with a heavy sigh, “is more pitchblende. It looks better than the last.”
“Tell us more about this pitchblende,” Johnny begged.