"Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre,
Mironton-ton-ton, mirontaine."
CHAPTER XLI
SENSE AND NONSENSE
Beresford speaking, to an audience of one, who listened with soft dark eyes aglow and sparkling.
"He's the best scout ever came over the border, Jessie. Trusty as steel, stands the gaff without whining, backs his friends to the limit, and plays the game out till the last card's dealt and the last trick lost. Tom Morse is a man in fifty thousand."
"I know another," she murmured. "Every word you've said is true for him too."
"He's a wonder, that other." admitted the soldier dryly. "But we're talking about Tom now. I tell you that iron man dragged West and me out of the Barrens by the scruff of our necks. Wouldn't give up. Wouldn't quit. The yellow in West came out half a dozen times. When the ten-day blizzard caught us, he lay down and yelped like a cur. I wouldn't have given a plugged six-pence for our chances. But Tom went out into it, during a little lull, and brought back with him a timber wolf. How he found it, how he killed it, Heaven alone knows. He was coated with ice from head to foot. That wolf kept us and the dogs alive for a week. Each day, when the howling of the blizzard died down a bit, Tom made West go down with him to the creek and get wood. It must have been a terrible hour. They'd come back so done up, so frozen, they could hardly stagger in with their jags of pine for the fire. I never heard the man complain—not once. He stood up to it the way Tom Sayers used to."
The girl felt a warm current of life prickling swiftly through her. "I love to hear you talk so generously of him."
"Of my rival?" he said, smiling. "How else can I talk? The scoundrel has been heaping on me those coals of fire we read about. I haven't told you half of it—how he nursed me like a woman and looked after me so that I wouldn't take cold, how he used to tuck me up in the sled with a hot stone at my feet and make short days' runs in order not to wear out my strength. By Jove, it was a deucedly unfair advantage he took of me."
"Is he your rival?" she asked.