In the course of the discussion the Senior Surgeon confesses an inherited tendency for drink, and adds that he leaves liquor alone for eleven months in the year, but always goes off to Canada every June for a hunting-trip, on which he drinks heavily. She insists that he go this year and that they marry before his departure, and not on his return, as he wishes. She wins her way, and the Senior Surgeon goes alone. Disquieting letters from her recall him before the end of the month.
NOBODY looks very well in the dawn. Certainly the Senior Surgeon didn’t. Heavily, as a man wading through a bog of dreams, he stumbled out of his cabin into the morning. Under his drowsy, brooding eyes appalling shadows circled. Behind his sunburn, deeper than his tan, something sinister and uncanny lurked wanly like the pallor of a soul. Yet the Senior Surgeon had been most blamelessly abed and asleep since griddle-cake-time the previous evening.
Only the mountains and the forest and the lake had been out all night. For seventy miles of Canadian wilderness only the mountains and the forest and the lake stood actually convicted of having been out all night. Dank and white with its vaporous vigil, the listless lake kindled wanly to the new day’s breeze. Blue with cold, a precipitous mountain peak lurched craggedly home through a rift in the fog. Drenched with mist, bedraggled with dew, a green-feathered pine-tree lay guzzling insatiably at a leaf-brown pool. As monotonous as a sob, the waiting birch canoe slosh-sloshed against the beach.
There was no romantic smell of red roses in this June landscape; just tobacco smoke, and the faint reminiscent fragrance of fried trout, and the mournful, sizzling, pungent consciousness of a camp-fire quenched for a whole year with a tinful of wet coffee-grounds.
Gliding out cautiously into the lake as though the mere splash of a paddle might shatter the whole glassy surface, the Indian guide propounded the question that was uppermost in his mind.
“Cutting your trip a bit short this year, ain’t you, Boss?” he quizzed tersely.
Out from his muffling Mackinaw collar the Senior Surgeon parried the question with an amazingly novel sense of embarrassment.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered with studied lightness. “There are one or two things at home that are bothering me a little.”
“A woman, eh?” said the Indian guide, laconically.
“A woman?” thundered the Senior Surgeon. “A—woman? Oh, ye gods, no! It’s wall-paper.”