“But that there medicine o’ Doc Johnston’s ’ll melt the misery out o’ me all right,” he said. “I’ll be takin’ a dose of it this time to-morrow night; and ye’ll see me to work agin within a couple o’ days, Young Dan, spry as a cat an’ loose as ashes.”
“Don’t you worry about the work, Andy,” returned Young Dan. “Give the medicine a fair chance when you get it. I hope Pete will be back by to-morrow night—but he couldn’t of traveled much this afternoon, in that storm and in country strange to him.”
“That’s where ye’re wrong,” replied Andy. “I never knowed a likelier man nor that same Pete Sabatis to go to wherever he wanted to git to. He could do that trip backwards, an’ with both eyes patched instead of only one. That flurry o’ snow wouldn’t stop him a minute, in strange country or old.”
“What happened to his eye, anyhow?” asked Young Dan.
Andy rubbed his thin knees with his thin hands for several seconds in silence, gazing thoughtfully into the red draft of the stove. Then he looked at his partner and combed his long whiskers with long fingers.
“Maybe he wouldn’t care for me to tell ye that, lad,” he said. “I reckon he wouldn’t yet awhile, till he knows ye better. But I kin tell ye this much, pardner—I was with him when he lost it, twenty-four year ago—and he is as good a man with one eye as ever he was with two. He lost it in a kinder private affair, ye understand: and there ain’t a prouder man walkin’ the woods either side the height-o’-land nor him—exceptin’ in the matter o’ baccy.”
CHAPTER VIII
THE ADVENTURE OF SABATIS
The wind was abroad all the next day, sweeping the snow from the broad branches and high spires of the forest and shoveling it into drifts along the windward edges of all open spaces. Young Dan worked at the wood-pile and the pelts all day, and Mr. Mace smoked his pipe and rubbed his painful joints and wondered if old age were creeping upon him. Young Dan was chopping a stick of dry birch near the door, and the small sun was on the edge of the western horizon, when Pete Sabatis appeared. Pete was powdered white with snow from the webbed racquets on his feet to the crown of his fur cap.
“Howdy,” he said.