“I think he is beginning to have a profound respect for the Company,” Barreau told me that night as we sat over our fire. “They have set him thinking. It seems that none of his men could get so much as a glimpse of a moccasin track. Still, their saddle horses and pack-mules were systematically shot down, until they were afoot again. After that they were not molested. He knows that his whole party could as easily have been put out of the way. That seems to have put the fear of God into the lot of them. They can’t understand the object. I don’t, myself, altogether. But I could hazard a close guess, I think.” All that night and the next day the big snowflakes came gyrating down. The temperature remained the same, just short of freezing, and a dead calm lay over the land. Then it faired gradually. With the clearing sky the feathery snowfall melted and disappeared. Upon its passing the night frosts took on a keener edge. Little vagrant gusts of wind went frolicking through the open spaces in the woods, fluttering the dry, fallen leaves into tiny heaps and scattering them again. Sometimes of a night these same whisperings of the North rattled the bare limbs of the cottonwoods and birch till the miles of forest seemed to voice a protesting murmur. Steadily the cold grew, and the sun rode lower on its diurnal passage. Save the pine and spruce and scattered cedars the great woods shivered in their nakedness, lacking the white robe which the North dons at such season. And presently that came also, with the deep-throated whoop of a north-east gale to herald its coming. In one night the Sicannie froze from bank to bank; at daybreak the wind drove curling streamers of loose snow across its glassy surface, to pile in frosty windows at the foot of the south slope. During this period we of the post settled into a routine of minor tasks. There were fires to keep against the cold. From dawn to dusk, somewhere within the stockade or on the timbered hill above, the clink of an axeblade on frosty wood rang like a bell. That, and water for cooking, and caring for the stock now housed in the long stable, kept time from hanging heavy on the hands of the men. Barreau and I gravitated between our cabin and the store. Montell sulked for a week after that last failure to reach the south. Then he emerged from his shell of silence, and became ponderously genial, talkative—a metamorphosis which Barreau regarded with frank contempt. He spoke to Montell no oftener than was necessary, and when he did speak his tongue was barbed. Openly and unequivocally he despised and distrusted his flesh-burdened partner, and he made no effort to hide the fact. For the most part Montell took his sneering unmoved, or grinned pacifically, but there were times when his red face went purple and his puffy eyelids would droop till the pupils glinted through mere slits, like a cat about to pounce. Then it would be Barreau’s turn to smile, in his slow ironic way.