"And there's still some of the same arnica we used on the last man who picked a fight with you, Jim," she added. "Who was he?" asked Homer. "A better man than you," replied the girl. The two young men eyed one another searchingly for several seconds. Then Steeves turned away, took up his coat and cap from the big settle beside the chimney, and went out, Jim sat down and took up his spoon. Flora refilled his cup. "Perhaps I should not have interfered," said Jim, glancing across the table. "Perhaps I had no right to, after all?" "You said you had a right to, as Mark's friend and partner," she answered. The Racket River country froze hard and deep that night and all the next day and yet harder and deeper on the following night. The river froze clear across, except in places of broken white water; and a third night of intense freezing sealed even the rapids, leaving only a steaming airhole here and there. Caught naked, without their white blankets of snow, the clearings and rocky shores and hardwood swales looked dead, as if the swift frost had struck home to their summer hearts. Then came the merciful snow, after a red dawn. The snow continued to fall throughout a day and a night. Uncle Sam Ducat had engaged himself and a team of horses and a complete outfit of rigging for twitching and hauling to Henry Lunn for the winter. Mr. Lunn was operating on Ripping Brook, ten miles to the south and fifteen miles to the east of Piper's Glen; so Sam made an early start, muffled in a coon-skin coat, to a frosty jangle of bells, with dry snow puffing up from his horses' legs and the frozen vapor of their nostrils and the smoke of his pipe ascending in the nippy sunshine. Half an hour after Uncle Sam's departure, Jim Todhunter hitched the strawberry colt Dexter to the red pung and set out for Millbrook to purchase steel traps and provisions. He followed Sam Ducat's track, but the going was heavy. He had no more than reached the fork and straightened out on the river road than he was forced to draw rein. Someone, a human being of some sort, stood fair in the center of the snowy track, motionless. "Anything wrong?" asked Jim, standing up and looking over the tall colt at the obstruction. He saw then that it was an old woman wearing a brown hood and bulky with much sombre-hued clothing. Her hands were in red mittens; in one she held a little basket and a long staff and in the other something lengthy wrapped in a shawl. She looked at Jim with bright eyes out of a shriveled face. She did not answer his question. "May I have the pleasure of driving you to the village?" he asked. "No, I thank 'e," she replied. "Ye got beautiful manners, but I ain't a-goin' that way." She continued to stand motionless in the middle of the road, however, knee-deep in the dry snow between the hoof-tracks of Sam Ducat's team. "Isn't there anything I can do for you?" he asked. "Be ye carryin' a gun?--an' maybe some cartridges, Mister?"