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Mrs. Field smiled faintly. “Don’t joke about it, Ed. I can’t get that wife out of my mind.”

III

A few very cold gray days followed, and then the north wind cleared the sky; and, though it was still cold, it was pleasant. The sky had only a small white cloud here and there to make its blueness the more profound.

Ridgeley dashed up to the door with a hardy little pair of broncos hitched to a light pair of bobs, and Mrs. Field was tucked in like a babe in a cradle.

Almost the first thing she asked was, “How is Williams?”

“Oh, he’s getting on nicely. He refused to sleep with his bunk-mate, and finally had to lick him, I understand, to shut him up. Challenged the whole camp, then, to let him alone or take a licking. They let him alone, Lawson says. G’lang there, you rats!”

Mrs. Field said no more, for the air was whizzing by her ears, and she hardly dared look out, so keen was the wind; but as soon as they entered the deeps of the forest it was profoundly still.

The ride that afternoon was a glory she never forgot. Everywhere yellow-greens and purple shadows. The sun in a burnished blue sky flooded the forests with light, striking down through even the thickest pines to lay in fleckings of radiant white and gold upon the snow.

The trail (it was not a road) ran like a graceful furrow over the hills, around little lakes covered deep with snow, through tamarack swamps where the tracks of wild things thickened, over ridges of tall pine clear of brush, and curving everywhere amid stumps, where dismantled old shanties marked the site of the older logging camps. Sometimes they met teams going to the store. Sometimes they crossed logging roads–wide, smooth tracks artificially iced, down which mountainous loads of logs were slipping, creaking, and groaning. Sometimes they heard the dry click-clock of the woodsmen’s axes or the crash of falling trees deep in the wood. When they reached the first camp Ridgeley pulled up the steaming horses at the door and shouted, “Hello, the camp!”

A tall old man with a long red beard came out. He held one bare red arm above his eyes. He wore an apron.

“Hello, Sandy!”

“Hello, Mr. Ridgeley!”

“Ready for company?”

“Am always ready for company,” he said, with a Scotch accent.

“Well, we’re coming in to get warm.”

“Vera weel.”

As they went in, under the roofed shed between the cook’s shanty and the other and larger shanty, Mrs. Field sniffed. Sandy led them past a large pyramid composed of the scraps of beef bones, egg-shells, cans, and tea grounds left over during the winter. In the shed itself hung great slabs of beef.

It was all as untidy and suggestive of slaughter as the nest of a brood of eagles.

Sandy was beginning dinner on a huge stove spotted with rust and pancake batter. All about was the litter of his preparation. Beef–beef on all sides, and tin dishes and bare benches and huge iron cooking-pans.

Mrs. Field was glad to get out into the sunlight again. “What a horrible place! Are they all like that?”

“No, my camps are not like that–or, I should say, our camps,” Ridgeley added, with a smile.

“Not a gay place at all,” said Field, in exaggerated reserve.

But Mrs. Field found her own camps not much better. True, the refuse was not raised in pyramidal shape before the front door, and the beef was a little more orderly, but the low log huts, the dim cold light, the dingy walls and floors, the lack of any womanly or home touch, the tin dishes, the wholesale cooking, all struck upon her with terrible force.

“Do human beings live here?” she asked Ridgeley, when he opened the door of the main shanty of No. 6.

“Forty creatures of the men kind sleep and house here,” he replied.

“To which the socks and things give evidence,” said Field, promptly, pointing toward the huge stove which sat like a rusty-red cheese in the centre of the room. Above it hung scores of ragged gray and red socks and Mackinac boots and jackets which had been washed by the men themselves.