"That sort of separated grain--out of tins. Like chicken's food! It's not the real thing. You should eat corn on the cob--American fashion! It's fine. I had it when I was in the States. You know, you take it up in your hands by both ends--you've seen the cobs?--and gnaw." The craving air of Labrador at a temperature of -20° Fahrenheit, and methodically stinted rations, make great changes in the outward qualities of the mind. "_I'd_ like to do that," said Marjorie. Her face flushed a little at a guilty thought, her eyes sparkled. She leant forward and spoke in a confidential undertone. "_I'd--I'd like to eat a mutton chop like that_," said Marjorie. § 20 One morning Marjorie broached something she had had on her mind for several days. "Old man," she said, "I can't stand it any longer. I'm going to thaw my scissors and cut your hair.... And then you'll have to trim that beard of yours." "You'll have to dig out that looking-glass." "I know," said Marjorie. She looked at him. "You'll never be a pretty man again," she said. "But there's a sort of wild splendour.... And I love every inch and scrap of you...." Their eyes met. "We're a thousand deeps now below the look of things," said Trafford. "We'd love each other minced." She broke into that smiling laugh of hers. "Oh! it won't come to _that_," she said. "Trust my housekeeping!" CHAPTER THE FIFTH THE TRAIL TO THE SEA § 1 One astonishing afternoon in January a man came out of the wilderness to Lonely Hut. He was a French-Indian half-breed, a trapper up and down the Green River and across the Height of Land to Sea Lake. He arrived in a sort of shy silence, and squatted amiably on a log to thaw. "Much snow," he said, "and little fur." After he had sat at their fire for an hour and eaten and drunk, his purpose in coming thawed out. He explained he had just come on to them to see how they were. He was, he said, a planter furring; he had a line of traps, about a hundred and twenty miles in length. The nearest trap in his path before he turned northward over the divide was a good forty miles down the river. He had come on from there. Just to have a look. His name, he said, was Louis Napoleon Partington. He had carried a big pack, a rifle and a dead marten,--they lay beside him--and out of his shapeless mass of caribou skins and woolen clothing and wrappings, peeped a genial, oily, brown face, very dirty, with a strand of blue-black hair across one eye, irregular teeth in its friendly smile, and little, squeezed-up eyes. Conversation developed. There had been doubts of his linguistic range at first, but he had an understanding expression, and his English seemed guttural rather than really bad.