Sam removed his pipe, blew a cloud straight before him, and replaced it.

Dick reddened slowly, got up with an incidental remark about damn fools,
and began to spread his blankets beneath the lean-to shelter. He
muttered to himself, angered at the dead opposition of circumstance
which he could not push aside. Suddenly he seized the girl again by the
arm.

"Why you come?" he demanded in Ojibway. "Where you get your blankets?
Where you get your grub? How you make the Long Trail? What you do when
we go far and fast? What we do with you now?" Then meeting nothing but
the stolidity with which the Indian always conceals pain, he flung her
aside. "Stupid owl!" he growled.

He sat on the ground and began to take off his moccasins with
ostentatious deliberation, abruptly indifferent to it all. Slowly he
prepared for the night, yawning often, looking at the sky, arranging the
fire, emphasising and delaying each of his movements as though to prove
to himself that he acknowledged only the habitual. At last he turned in,
his shoulder thrust aggressively toward the two motionless figures by
the fire.

It was by now close to midnight. The big moon had long since slipped
from behind the solitary wolf on the hill. Yet Sam Bolton made no move
toward his blankets, and the girl did not stir from the downcast
attitude into which she had first fallen. The old woodsman looked at the
situation with steady eyes. He realised to the full what Dick Herron's
thoughtlessness had brought on them. A woman, even a savage woman inured
to the wilderness, was a hindrance. She could not travel as fast nor as
far; she could not bear the same burdens, endure the same hardship; she