“I fear Shon McGann and Pierre wouldn’t enjoy being with us as I should enjoy having them. You can never understand what a life that is out in Pierre’s country. If it weren’t for you and the bairn, I should be off there now. There is something of primeval man in me. I am never so healthy and happy, when away from you, as in prowling round the outposts of civilisation, and living on beans and bear’s meat.”
He stretched to his feet, and his wife rose with him. There was a fine colour on his cheek, and his eye had a pleasant fiery energy. His wife tapped him on the arm with her fan. She understood him very well, though pretending otherwise. “Duke, you are incorrigible. I am in daily dread of your starting off in the middle of the night, leaving me--”
“--and hearing nothing more from you till a cable from Quebec or Winnipeg tells me that you are on your way to the Arctic Circle with Pierre or some other heathen. But, seriously, where did you meet Mr. Vandewaters--Heavens, what a name!--and that other person? And what is the other person’s name?”
“The other person carries the contradictory name of Stephen Pride.”
“Why does he continually finger his face, and show his emotions so? He assents to everything said to him by an appreciative exercise of his features.”
“My dear, you ask a great and solemn question. Let me introduce the young man, that you may get your answer at the fountain-head.”
“Wait a moment, Duke. Sit down and tell me when and where you met these men, and why you have continued the acquaintance.”
“Molly,” he said, obeying her, “you are a terrible inquisitor, and the privacy of one’s chamber were the kinder place to call one to account. But I bend to your implacability.... Mr. Vandewaters, like myself, has a taste for roving, though our aims are not identical. He has a fine faculty for uniting business and pleasure. He is not a thorough sportsman--there is always a certain amount of enthusiasm, even in the unrewarded patience of the true hunter; but he sufficeth. Well, Mr. Vandewaters had been hunting in the far north, and looking after a promising mine at the same time. He was on his way south at one angle, I at another angle, bound for the same point. Shon McGann was with me; Pierre with Vandewaters. McGann left me, at a certain point, to join his wife at a Barracks of the Riders of the Plains. I had about a hundred miles to travel alone. Well, I got along the first fifty all right. Then came trouble. In a bad place of the hills I fell and broke an ankle bone. I had an Eskimo dog of the right sort with me. I wrote a line on a bit of birch bark, tied it round his neck, and started him away, trusting my luck that he would pull up somewhere. He did. He ran into Vandewaters’s camp that evening. Vandewaters and Pierre started away at once. They had dogs, and reached me soon.