“He’ll hear yer, you durn fool!”
Turner scowled. Comrades though they were, and in a desperate plight, he disliked the unwonted familiarity of the uncouth man more than he objected to the slur.
“He won’t. He’s only hearing his own maudlin talk. Man, you’ve got no heart, no sentiment!”
“Sentiment? What’s that?”
Turner shrugged.
“What you—haven’t got. Let him alone. Don’t nag him. It’s just a question of hours.”
“I’m tryin’ to buck him up, tha’s all. Got to get him outer here purty soon. Reckon we kin stick him on one mule by bunching what’s left of the outfit an’ crowdin’ it on the other one.”
“Impossible,” decided Turner, frowning. “We’ll simply do what we can for him till he—passes. Please speak to him kindly.” He turned again to his handy volume of the classics.
McAdams seized a small-caliber rifle and went after ptarmigan, a sparse few of which they had seen the day before in the bushlike willows of the divide. Their plight for food was desperate. A bird or two would make soup for the old man.
But Enoch Whipple was nearly beyond all help from food when the middle-aged, “unsentimental” McAdams returned belatedly, the early dark of the northern fall upon them. A couple of birds—already turning white to meet the coming winter—were slung over the barrel of his gun. Old Whipple was raving.