He was right. If there had been a thermometer in the Right Prong country it would have marked twenty-five degrees below zero just then. Young Dan was agreeable; but he would have stood there and continued the motions of fishing, slowly and more slowly until the numbness caught his heart, if the old man had not suggested a move. When two good men go into the woods together, and one of them is well past four score years of age and the other has not yet completed his first score, the spur of competition is bound to prod now and then. In this matter of endurance against the cold the partners had silently and almost unconsciously competed. No rivalry of youth and age had inspired them, but rather the rivalry of two widely separated generations of youth; for old Andy Mace considered himself as good a man as he had ever been and so a trifle better than Young Dan, maybe, because of his birth and training in a period of the world’s existence that had marked its very highest point of development. He said nothing of all this to Young Dan, of course—even if he thought it.
They gathered up their gear and scooped the frozen fish into a couple of sacks. Not a word did they exchange until they were both on the warm side of their own door; and even then they didn’t exchange many. An hour later, however, when the “riz” biscuits, broiled venison steak, and the coffee-pot were on the table, they talked “good and plenty.”
Woodsmen are not generally supposed to be talkative folk. If there is any truth in this general supposition, then Young Dan and old Andy Mace must be the two exceptions that prove it—if suppositions, like rules, can be proved by exceptions. However that may be, these two woodsmen spent every evening in conversation, crawling into their bunks at last only because they couldn’t hear in their sleep. And their talk was not all of the woods and the day’s work. Far from it. They had much more to say concerning what they thought than what they knew; and so almost every subject under the sun was dealt with. Even when Young Dan read aloud, Andy capped every paragraph with a comment or an explanation, or an objection of equal or greater length. Their library contained only three small volumes of fiction, all from one entertaining pen—but under their system of reading, three promised to be plenty, for one winter at least. In spite of his interruptions, Andy Mace was a hungry listener, and so his interest in the adventures and mental processes of Mr. Sherlock Holmes soon became almost as keen as his partner’s. No one could be more sharply intrigued by an artful combination of significant words than that old trapper.
On the night of the day of the cold fishing, after the last fragment of steak had been devoured, Young Dan opened one of the treasured books and began to read aloud; and, at the same moment, Andy began to cut tobacco for his pipe. Andy gave ear intently until the tobacco was shredded, rolled, stuffed into the pipe and satisfactorily lighted. He blew three large, slow clouds and settled back in his chair.
“I wisht we had that gent here on Right Prong with us,” he said. “He’d stand it all right, too, I reckon, in a good coonskin coat. What d’ye cal’late he’d of made o’ that thief in claws?”
Young Dan closed the book on a finger.
“I guess he would of known it wasn’t a bear right off,” he said. “I did. I suspicioned it wasn’t, anyhow. I guess he would of known for sure, right off; and maybe he wouldn’t of figgered it out the way I did, neither—not by the molasses jug alone, perhaps.”
“How else could he figger it out? What else was there to figger on?”
“Plenty for him. I can think of some other things myself, now. There were the claw-marks. I guess those alone would of been enough for Mr. Holmes.”
“What about ’em? They were marks of a b’ar’s claws.”