Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/17

Rh, Dick," he said. "I saw a wolverine white as a leper just now."

The rowel of memory touched him. He sat up with his brown, sensitive face hardening, and the other looked at him through the mask of amused indifference which hid him when he cared to hide. For a lie lay between these two; high as a woman's yellow head, and unstable as the young love they both had given her. Tempest asked questions, and Dick answered civilly, according to his station. Then he turned his back on Tempest, and walked to the door, looking out. The sun was dead on the livid bowl of the sky and the pale river where the wind blew. His love for the yellow-haired woman had been dead long since. But his love for this man who had trodden the outer trails of the north with him was quick yet; how quick he had not known until he felt the shivering beat of Tempest's heart under his hand just now.

Later, he brought food from his canoe; lit the rusty, broken stove, and spread his thin waterproof mattress and his blanket for Tempest. This was bare duty only because of that extra stripe on Tempest's sleeve. Then, using still the language of passers-by, they lay down; Tempest in restless pain by the stove, and Dick on the threshold, with cheek on arm and his revolver pushed like the nose of a dog into his palm. And beyond their sleeping bodies stretched that great land which had fashioned and hardened them; which had known the tread of their moccasins along the forest-trails beaten asphalt-smooth by the passing of many generations, and had heard their voices call each other across rivers that had never parted them as the after years had done.

In the morning Dick found a sturgeon-head scow in the reeds, and he went to Tempest, suggesting with colourless civility the advisability of tracking her up river with Tempest aboard.

"She has probably got loose from Pitcher Portage," he said. "Moonias has ripped the side out of his canoe, and you've lost yours. We could freight all we have left on the scow."

Tempest nodded consent. He walked and moved with the crisp strength Dick knew of old, and his eyes were