That was how I came to break bread with them a second time, and it was not the last by any means. In the ensuing five or six days I wore a distinct path between my cabin and theirs. Montell made it a point to descend upon me at some hour of the day, and, after all, I was not so loth. I am constrained to admit that Jessie Montell was the one bright spot in those dreary, monotonous days. With Barreau gone, I was a lonely mortal indeed. Those evenings at Montell’s passed away many a leaden-footed hour. After that first time Jessie never challenged me in that imperious, judicial manner, anent my Benton escapade. We spoke of it, to be sure, but in terms dispassionate, uncritical. When Montell was about, he and I played cribbage. When she and I were alone, we talked. We discovered a similar taste in books, a mutual acquaintance or two in St. Louis. And we gravely discussed the prospects of getting home in the spring. Naturally, she was a rabid partisan, hating the Hudson’s Bay Company with outspoken frankness. Moreover, she spoke confidently of her father’s power to beat them at their own game, notwithstanding the strong hand shown by the Company so shortly before. Of Barreau’s part in the war for pelts, she seemed profoundly ignorant. His name never passed her lips. Once the swelling left my arm the torn place healed rapidly. So that by the end of a week I felt no inconvenience, and it was beyond need of any treatment save a simple bandage to protect it from the rubbing of my sleeve. Then I bethought me of my neglected snowshoeing, and sallied forth on the track of that free, effortless stride which had so far eluded me. At the gate of the stockade I turned back, on the impulse of the moment, and went to the Montell cabin to ask Jessie if she were a snowshoe expert or wished to become one. “Thank Heaven for a chance to see the outside of this stockade wall once more,” she cried, in mock fervor. “Will I go snowshoeing? Yea, and verily. I detest being mewed up, and I don’t like to wander off alone. This big desolate country is so forbidding. Yes, I’ve snowshoed a little—one winter in the Wisconsin woods.”