The two young people confronted each other across the ruined food which his skill and labor had provided, her bungling destroyed. The subject for quarrel was a very real one, terrifyingly concrete and pressing. They were afraid of it; nor did they at that moment fail to realize the mighty bond of love which still was strong between them. Both would have been glad to make some advance toward peace, some movement of reconciliation; neither knew how to do it. In Lance, the torture of the thing expressed itself only in a fiery glance turned upon his wife's handiwork. To Callista, this was so intolerable that she laid about her for an adequate retort. "Well," she said, affecting a judicial coolness, "it's true I don't know much about taking care of wild meat. We never had such in my home. There was always plenty of chickens and turkeys; and if we put up meat, it was our own shoats and beef." Deer are growing scarce in the Cumberlands; not in half a dozen cabins throughout the Turkey Tracks would venison be eaten that season. But Lance adduced nothing of this. "I think you might as well let the dogs have the rest of it," he said finally, with a singular gentleness in his tone. Then he added with a sudden upswelling of resentment, "Give it to 'em if they'll eat it--which I misdoubt they'll never do." [193] CHAPTER XIII. BROKEN CHORDS. AFTER the episode of the ruined venison, Callista tried sulking--refusing to speak. But she found in Lance a power of silence that so far overmatched her own as to leave her daunted. He returned now from his long expeditions, to hang up his wild meat in the grove, and thereafter to sit bright-eyed and silent across the hearth from her, whistling, under his breath, or strumming lightly on his banjo. Callista was a concrete, objective individual, yet she grew to recognize the resources of one who had for his familiars dreams that he could bid to stand at his knee and beguile his leisure or his loneliness. But dreams, so treated, have a trick of strengthening themselves against times of depression, changing their nature, and wringing with cruel fingers the heart which entertains them; so that those who feed the imagination must be willing to endure the strength of its chastisements. Yet if Lance Cleaverage suffered, he kept always a brave front, and took his suffering away from under the eye of his young wife. To do him justice, he had little understanding of his own offences. An ardent huntsman, he had by choice [194] lived hard much of his life, sleeping in the open in all weathers, eating what came to hand. Callista's needs he was unfitted to gauge, and she maintained a haughty silence concerning them. Since she would not inquire, he told her nothing of having been offered money to play at dances, but began to be sometimes from home at nights, taking his banjo, leaving her alone.