For this he
refused all payment except his rations.
Scotty continued eastward to Churchill, and for seven weeks I bunked with
Thornton in the shack. At the end of those seven weeks I knew little more
about Thornton than at the beginning. I never had a closer or more
congenial chum, and yet in his conversation he never got beyond the big
woods, the mountains, and the tangled swamps. He was educated and a
gentleman, and I knew that in spite of his brown face and arms, his hard
muscles and splendid health, he was three-quarters tenderfoot. But he
loved the wilderness.
"I never knew what life could hold for a man until I came up here," he
said to me one day, his gray eyes dancing in the light of a glorious
sunset.
"I'm ten years younger than I was two years ago."
"You've been two years in the north?"
"A year and ten months," he replied.
Something brought to my lips the words that I had forced back a score of
times.
"What brought you up here, Thornton?"
"Two things," he said quietly, "a woman--and a scoundrel."
He said no more, and I did not press the matter. There was a strange
tremble in his voice, something that I took to be a note of sadness; but
when he turned from the sunset to me his eyes were filled with a yet
stranger joy, and his big boyish laugh rang out with such wholesome
infectiousness that I laughed with him, in spite of myself.
That night, in our shack, he produced a tightly bound bundle of letters
about six inches thick, scattered them out before him on the table, and
began reading them at random, while I sat bolstered back in my bunk,
smoking and watching him.
Pages:
114
115
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119
120
121
122
123
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128
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132
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