“I’m feelin’ fine,” said he.
“Shall we get to Canada?”
“I’ll be all right to-morrow.”
“We ought to have gone further whilst the goin’ was good, eh?”
“I’m sorry, Stephen,” said he apologetically.
“But this is good?”
“It’s good enough for me.”
“All right.”
Bringing in wood for a big fire is rather a tedious job, but I hit on a sporting way of doing it all by myself, and doing it better. We were at seven thousand feet, and the avalanches and spring floods and storms had wrought havoc among the trees. Fine dead trunks lay in scores on the mighty slope of the mountain. Our fire was at the foot of a slippery granite slide. So I took a stout young pine-tree, and began to lever the great dead trees and set them rolling downward. Vachel was perched on a rock above the fire, and the logs arrived at the embers below like colliding locomotives, with a great bump and showers of sparks. It was possible to lever and roll downwards logs that were thirty or forty feet long, and we pulled the great lumps of their sprawling resinous roots on to the fire.