The voice fairly drowned the mind of Jack Trainor, but he managed to smile faintly. “I’m here, right enough,” he said.
At that, the big man slumped into a chair and heaved a great sigh. Jack saw that the other was on the point of collapse from exhaustion. Sweat was running down his face. The rosy cheeks were veined with purple from overexertion.
“Lord, Lord,” groaned the big man. “I thought that you’d never come ’round. I thought you was going…”
He did not finish his suggestion, but lolled back more heavily in his chair, laughing weakly and making a gesture to Jack to signify that all was well.
The man of the cattle ranges of the southland heaved himself up on his elbow and looked about him. He found that he was in a small cabin, the walls of which were of massive logs, with a small stove in the center, a bunk on one side, and guns,traps, and fishing tackle covering the walls. Plainly it was a trapper who had blundered upon him. Then it occurred to him with a start that he weighed a full 180 pounds.
“How far did you carry me?” he asked.
“Three miles…I guess,” gasped the other.
“Three miles?” echoed Jack, and then, looking more closely at his companion, he saw that it was indeed possible. The man was a giant, standing several inches above six feet, and weighing twenty or thirty pounds above 200—and all of this solid muscle.
But now the prostrate giant recovered himself. He rose from his chair and staggered to a corner from which he began to produce bacon and flour, and in a few minutes he had the beginnings of a meal smoking on top of the stove. As for Jack, he felt that, had he been 100 miles away and soundly asleep, his nose would have brought him these tidings of food and roused him.
Sitting up to throw back his covers, he found that he was astonishingly weak. He had to lean back against the side of the cabin again, and the big man, reeling with weakness as though from liquor, laughed joyously at him.
“The last mile pretty near finished me,” he declared. “I thought I was gone, my friend, I promise you. But I prayed to the good Lord. He gave me strength. And so here we are, both of us!” And he laughed again.
There was something at once so kindly and so childishly simple in what he said, and in his manner of saying it, that Jack felt his very heart warmed by the big man.
“Partner,” he said, and found that his voice was strangely small and husky, “you’ve saved my life.Nobody else that I know of could’ve carried me the way you carried me.”
“I?” said the other, shaking his head violently. “What I have done is nothing…nothing. But only think of the luck…that I saw the toe of your boot sticking up through the surface of the snow, and that I knew it was not a branch showing.”
Jack Trainor shuddered and caught his breath. Had he been as near to death as that? Had the snow entirely drifted over him?
He held out his hand to the big man. “What’s your name? I’m Jack Trainor.”
“And I, Joseph Bigot.”
“Joseph, before I come to the end of my life, I’ll show you how I appreciate what you’ve done for me.”
“Tush,” said the other, flushing a brighter red. “You talk about such things later. Now I got no time!”
And he resolutely turned his back upon his guest and went ahead with the preparation of the food.
Chapter 3
A month had passed. The mountains were covered with a thick white crust that would bear the weight of a man. And behold a new Jack Trainor, whistling down the mountain trail! He was clad in a clumsy fur garment that obviously had been made for a bigger man than he. His appearance was that of a monster in a sagging skin. But he walked freely and easily on the far side of the trail, he entered the cabin, and he exhibited the duster of pelts that he had carried in.
Big Joseph Bigot sat cross-legged on the floor, working over the last broken trap that he had stayed at home to repair that day. His practiced eye looked swiftly over the catch of the day, and he shook his head.
“No more days like yesterday…but then, my friend, that is enough luck for one season, eh?”
“Sure,” said Jack, smiling, “luck enough, I guess. And here’s another that I forgot to throw in with the rest.”
And, so saying, he threw down a dark and shiningpelt, a fox skin, the fur of which was like blowing feathers, so soft and light was it. It brought a shout from Bigot. He plunged to his feet and seized the skin. He sprang to the door with it. He let the gray light fall upon it. Then he whirled and executed about the cabin a clumsy bear dance that threatened to wreck the place.
“Ah,” he cried when he could speak, “ah, Jack, it is true, what I told you yesterday when we brought in the catch! You have beginner’s luck! If we keep on, we shall be rich. You hear? Rich!”
Jack Trainor regarded his companion with a great deal of curiosity and even a trace of scorn. According to his own code, it was far better to conceal all traces of emotion. As for the bit of soft fur that he had taken from the trap, and that he now had shown, he had known that it was a particularly fine one to look at and to touch. But why it should bring such rejoicing from the trapper he could not imagine.
“I dunno,” he said slowly, “but it looks to me like a pretty far cry from this here fur to being rich.”
“Does it?” said Joseph Bigot. “Man alive, d’you know what that fur is?”
“What?”
“It’s blue fox! It’s the finest fur that a man can get. It’s what every trapper dreams about. If I told you that a thousand dollars would be…”
“A thousand dollars,” gasped Jack, amazed.
“I dunno what the market will be,” said Joseph Bigot, “but I know this one thing…that I’m going to write to the girl today and tell her that in the spring we can get married.” He cast up both of his long arms and shook his fists at the ceiling. “The time’s come!” he said. “I’ve waited twelve years, and now the time’s come!”
Jack Trainor forgot about the fox skin and the price it might bring. Instead, he could think of nothing but the last statement of the big Canadian.
“D’you mean to say that you’ve been engaged to the same girl for twelve years?” he breathed.
Bigot laughed. “Twelve years I have waited,” he answered enigmatically. “First I wait for one, and then I wait for the other…twelve years altogether.”
And he would say no more about it until they had cooked and eaten their supper and cleaned up the tins. After that, they sat around for the long, bleak evening. Outside, the freezing sap in the trees was bursting with loud reports from time to time, for the thermometer had dropped fully thirty degrees since midday. At midday it had been cold enough, a wind at ten below zero coursing over the summit and shrieking through the trees. That wind had the edges of icy knives to go through and through even the thickest furs, and the only way to keep from being frozen was to stir about. Now, at night, there was not a stir of the air. The big pale moon moved up a cloudless sky. The mountains, under its light, were either black with forest and shadow or glistening in strange blue-white. And the cold was so terrible that it needed no wind to drive it home.
In the sides of the little cabin it found crevices and cracks through which to slide like rapier points, stabbing every living thing it struck. The stove roared, and the wood within it kept up a steady hissing of sap and humming, while the top of the stove was red hot. All the air in the room above the top of that stove was clear and warm. All the air below the surface of that stove was glittering with hoar frost. The upper parts of the bodies of the men were almost too warm, but below the knees they were slowly freezing. One could feel the sharply defined borderline between the upper and the lower strata of atmosphere by passing the hand through the air. It was almost like moving the hands from warm water into ice water.