CHAPTER XV BILL AND THOMAS

In front of a crackling wood fire, three men dried their wet and bedraggled garments. In spite of the close proximity to the blaze they shivered and their teeth chattered and they looked very unhappy and uncomfortable, indeed. Two of the men wore the conventional garb of white prospector or trapper, while the third, a tall, rather handsome fellow with clear blue eyes and a decisive chin, was arrayed in what might once have been a uniform of his majesty’s Royal North West Mounted Police.

“We gotta thank you,” said one of the men quite humbly, “fer gettin’ us out of that river. Yuh saved our lives all right, but our grub-stake an’ ever’thing we had is gone.”

“Yes,” he resumed mournfully. “Gone! It’s Bill’s fault.”

“I think,” said the man in the wretched uniform, “that it was partly my fault. I startled him. I shouldn’t have cried out to you. It drew his attention and for a moment he must have forgotten to steer.”
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The maligned and unfortunate person referred to as “Bill,” drew himself up to a proud height and grunted his disdain. Then he turned his back haughtily upon his partner and addressed himself to the man in the uniform.

“Thomas here,” he declared deprecatingly, jerking one thumb over his shoulder, “ain’t allers responsible fer what he says. I wasn’t the only one that’s been a steerin’ o’ that boat. He was a helpin’ too. An’ he kep’ puttin’ me off, Thomas did, with his jabbin’ here an’ there in the water, like the crazy fool what he is.”

“No such thing,” remonstrated Thomas. “Did yuh tell the officer what yuh done yisterday? I ’spose that wuz all my fault too—you runnin’ aground.”

Bill wheeled about so swiftly that his dripping garments sprayed water in every direction. For a moment even the fire sputtered.

“A lie!” shouted the now infuriated Bill. “I wuz asleep in the boat an’——”

He paused for breath.
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“Asleep when yuh wuz supposed to be on duty,” his partner completed the sentence for him. “That’s the trouble with you, Bill. You don’t pay no ’tention to nothin’. Yuh don’t use your brains; yuh don’t look; yuh don’t listen. Yuh go ’round dreamin’, with your head up in the air an’ your intelligence in the seat o’ your pants. An’,” Thomas completed his lecture defiantly, “I won’t take that back neither.”

The conversation had reached a critical, dangerous stage, and the man in the frayed uniform thought it wise to intervene.

“If you’ll pardon me, gentlemen, I believe I can settle this dispute. I’ve been thinking it over, and the more I think about it, the more clearly it appears to me that the responsibility is all mine. It was my shout that startled both of you, that put you off—that caused all the trouble. I’d like to apologize.”

“It wuz a terrible shout,” admitted Thomas.

“Sounded like the howl of a madman,” declared Bill. “But yuh saved our lives an’ that’s somethin’ I won’t forget in a hurry. We’d be down in the bottom of the river now, keepin’ company with our rifles an’ our grub-stake, if it hadn’t been for you.”

The man in the uniform acknowledged the compliment with a somewhat weary smile.

“I’m afraid I saved you from one disaster only to plunge you into another. What are you going to do now?”

“Jus’ what do yuh mean?” asked Bill.

“How will you manage without rifles and supplies?”

Bill shook his head mournfully and turned to his partner.
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“He’s askin’ yuh a question,” he upbraided him, “can’t yuh hear?”

Thomas immediately applied himself to the problem in hand. He stared gloomily at the fire. Suddenly he brightened. He addressed the mounted policeman:

“But you got grub, ain’t yuh? You can sell us a little—enough to take us over to Half-Way House.”

“I’m almost in as bad straits as you are. I have a little flour—five or six pounds. I’ve had trouble too.”

“Five or six pounds o’ flour ain’t very much fer three hungry men like us,” ruminated Bill.

“Worse than nothin’,” said Thomas bitterly. “An’ that’s all yuh got?”

“All. Absolutely all! Found it in a cabin back here in the woods. I’m very sorry, gentlemen.”

Thomas dismissed the matter with a wave of his hand.

“If it can’t be helped—it can’t. I been plenty hungry before this.”

“Me too,” murmured Bill.

An interval of silence, during which three men shivered and shook before the fire—a fire that had commenced to burn itself out. Red, angry embers blinked up at them.

“Your turn to gather more wood,” Bill informed Thomas.
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Thomas scowled at the unpleasant imminence of this chilly duty and spat disgustedly into the lowering flames.

“Yuh better hurry,” implacably his partner spurred him on. “We’ll soon be freezin’ entirely. There ain’t enough heat here to warm a sparrow.”

Thomas grunted out an oath before he departed, purposely bumping against Bill as he lumbered past.

“Yuh can see the sort o’ disposition he’s got,” Bill complained to the policeman. “I been aputtin’ up with this sort o’ thing fer ten years now—ten years this comin’ March since we become partners.”

In spite of the fact that he was shivering, uncomfortable, worried, suffering untold agonies from his feet, the man in the frayed uniform smiled quietly to himself.

“Why don’t you break your partnership?” he suggested.

“Eh—what? What did yuh say, officer? Break up——”

For a moment Bill was so amazed, so utterly dumfounded at this simple solution to his difficulties, that he could not find words to express himself.

“That’s what I said. Break up your partnership. Quit each other. Each go your own way,” elucidated the policeman.
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It was an appalling thought. Unthinkable. Bill tried to picture a bleak pattern of existence from which Thomas had become erased. It filled him with a sense of loss so tremendously acute that it positively hurt. Little shivers of dismay ran up along his spine and seemed to settle there.

“Oh, Thomas ain’t so bad, once yuh get used to him,” he said. “Thomas got a queer way about him, an’ he’s cantankerous an’ stubborn, but he really don’t mean nothin’. Besides, I don’t rightly know what Thomas’d do after I left. He’s sort o’ helpless without me. He’s got so he sort o’ depends on me. Wouldn’t be worth his salt. I’d hate fer his sake——”

Thomas himself interrupted the conversation at this point by striding up with a huge armful of wood and throwing it angrily down upon the fire.

“Yuh can toast your shins now,” he declared angrily, glancing at Bill. “But next time it’s your turn.”

“Next time it’s my turn,” admitted Bill pleasantly. “I won’t ferget.”

“You’ll likely be asleep by then,” sputtered Thomas. “Great guns!—but ain’t that wind cold?”

“Winter’ll soon be here,” Bill croaked, humping up his shoulders and fighting back the smoke that drifted up around his head and into his eyes. “Six pounds o’ flour between three men an’ winter, an’ five hundred miles to the nearest tradin’ post.”

“Keechewan Mission is closer than that,” Thomas corrected him. “I ’spose we can go that way.”
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“Not me,” shivered Bill. “I’m as close to Keechewan Mission as I intend to get.”

“Did you come from there?” sharply inquired the policeman.

“No,” answered Thomas, “but we heard about it. It’s rotten with smallpox an’ boilin’ with trouble like a hot teakettle. It ain’t no good place fer a white man to be.”

“I’m going there,” said the policeman.

“Yuh don’t say?” gasped both men in one voice.

“If I can make it on two pounds of flour,” appended the policeman.

“You said yuh had six,” remembered Thomas.

“I’ll divide with you in the morning.”

Bill and Thomas exchanged glances of genuine wonder and admiration.

“I’d like tuh shake hands with you,” declared Thomas in an awed voice, offering one dirty paw.

“Me too,” said Bill, extending a hand equally as dirty. “You’re a real man an’ no mistake about that. What’s your name, officer?”

“Corporal Rand.”

“Where from?”

“Mackenzie barracks.”

“If I ain’t gettin’ personal, where’s your boots?”

“A Nitchie stole them one night while I slept.”

“The dirty skunk!”

“An’ your revolver?” noticed Thomas.
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“Stole that too.”

“Yuh mean to tell me,” exploded Bill, “that you’re goin’ up to Keechewan like that—no boots, two pounds o’ flour an’ nothin’ to protect yourself with when them rampagin’ Nitchies catch sight o’ yuh? If cold an’ hunger don’t get yuh, the smallpox will, an’ if the smallpox don’t get yuh, the Nitchies will. Yuh got about as much chance to come back alive as I have o’ jumpin’ up to the moon.”

“You’re a fool to try it,” grumbled Thomas.

“I have my instructions,” said Corporal Rand, and then remembered suddenly that this was not the truth. “I mean to say, I did have my instructions.”

“An’ yuh lost ’em?”

“No. The inspector changed his mind. He decided to go himself.”

“Why didn’t yuh let him?”

“It was either his life or mine.”

Thomas was puzzled. He appealed to Bill.

“I can’t make nothin’ out of this, can you?”

Bill came to the rescue. He picked up the thread of discourse, where the other had let it fall.

“Do yuh mean to say that this here inspector’s life is worth more to you than what your own is? That don’t seem reasonable.”
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“I intend to give you four pounds of flour in the morning,” Corporal Rand smiled. “Now do you mean to tell me that your lives are worth more to me than my own. Just figure it out.”

Bill and Thomas exchanged worried, doubtful glances, and commenced to figure. For twenty long minutes they threaded their way through a deep and abysmal mental swamp.

“I can’t make it out,” acknowledged Thomas.

“Me neither,” grumbled Bill. “You’re a bloomin’ martyr an’ no mistake.”

“We ain’t got nothin’ we can give you,” lamented Thomas, feeling in all of his pockets.

Then suddenly his face brightened.

“Here,” he announced proudly, presenting it, “is somethin’ yuh can have. Take it. Yuh never can tell. Mebbe it’ll save your life.”

Corporal Rand received the gift in the spirit that it was given. Nor did he belittle such a gift. Too well he knew the vagaries of the North, the unexpected turns of fortune, good and bad, the little inconsequential things upon which hinge life or death itself. Moisture had gathered in his eyes as carefully, almost lovingly, he put the gift away in an inner pocket:

Three fishhooks and a ball of string!