the grace to find it when necessity compels to the task. Alec Trenholme
found the new form of labour to which he had bidden himself toilsome and
delightful; like a true son of Adam, he was more conscious of his toil
than of his delight--still both were there; there was physical
inspiration in the light of the snow, the keen still air, and the sweet
smell of the lumber. So he grew more expert, and the days went past,
hardly distinguished from one another, so entire was the unconsciousness
of the slumber between them.

He had not come without some sensation of romance in his
knight-errantry. Bates was the centre, the kernel as it were, of a wild
story that was not yet explained. Turrif had disbelieved the details
Saul had given of Bates's cruelty to Cameron's daughter, and Trenholme
had accepted Turrif's judgment; but in the popular judgment, if
Cameron's rising was not a sufficient proof of Bates's guilt, the
undoubted disappearance of the daughter was. Whatever had been his
fault, rough justice and superstitious fear had imposed on Bates a term
of solitary confinement and penal servitude which so far he had accepted
without explanation or complaint. He still expressed no satisfaction at
Trenholme's arrival that would have been a comment on his own hard case
and a confession of his need. Yet, on the whole, Trenholme's interest in
him would have been heightened rather than decreased by a nearer view of
his monotonous life and his dry reserve, had it not been that the man
was to the last degree contentious and difficult to deal with.

Taking for granted that Trenholme was of gentle extraction, he treated
him with the generosity of pride in the matter of rations; but he
assumed airs of a testy authority which were in exact proportion to his
own feeling of physical and social inferiority. Seen truly, there was a
pathos in this, for it was a weak man's way of trying to be manful but