About five o’clock the gale went down, but it came on to snow.  At seven the Colonel said decidedly:  “We can’t make that cabin to-night.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not going any further, with this foot—­” He threw down the sled-rope, and limped after wood for the fire.

The Boy tilted the sled up by an ice-hummock, and spread the new canvas so that it gave some scant shelter from the snow.  Luckily, for once, the wind how grown quite lamb-like—­for the Yukon.  It would be thought a good stiff breeze almost anywhere else.

Directly they had swallowed supper the Colonel remarked:  “I feel as ready for my bed as I did Saturday night.”

Ah!  Saturday night—­that was different.  They looked at each other with the same thought.

“Well, that bed at Holy Cross isn’t any whiter than this,” laughed the Boy.

But the Colonel was not to be deceived by this light and airy reference.  His own unwilling sentiments were a guide to the Boy’s, and he felt it incumbent upon him to restore the Holy Cross incident to its proper proportions.  Those last words of Father Brachet’s bothered him.  Had they been “gettin’ at” the Boy?

“You think all that mission business mighty wonderful—­just because you run across it in Alaska.”

“And isn’t it wonderful at all?”

The Boy spoke dreamily, and, from force of old habit, held out his mittened hands to the unavailing fire.

The Colonel gave a prefatory grunt of depreciation, but he was pulling his blankets out from under the stuff on the sled.

The Boy turned his head, and watched him with a little smile.  “I’ll admit that I always used to think the Jesuits were a shady lot—­”

“So they are—­most of ’em.”

“Well, I don’t know about ’most of ’em.’  You and Mac used to talk a lot about the ‘motives’ of the few I do know.  But as far as I can see, every creature who comes up to this country comes to take something out of it—­except those Holy Cross fellas.  They came to bring something.”

The Colonel had got the blankets out now, but where was the rubber sheet?  He wouldn’t sleep on it in this weather, again, for a kingdom, but when the thaws came, if those explorer fellas were right—­

In his sense of irritation at a conscientious duty to perform and no clear notion of how to discharge it, he made believe it was the difficulty in finding the rubber sheet he didn’t want that made him out of sorts.

“It’s bitter work, anyhow, this making beds with your fingers stiff and raw,” he said.

“Is it?”

Dignity looked at Impudence sitting in the shelter, smiling.

“Humph!  Just try it,” growled the Colonel.

“I s’pose the man over the fire cookin’ supper does look better off than the ‘pore pardner’ cuttin’ down trees and makin’ beds in the snow.  But he isn’t.”

“Oh, isn’t he?” It was all right, but the Big Chimney boss felt he had chosen the lion’s share of the work in electing to be woodman; still, it wasn’t that that troubled him.  Now, what was it he had been going to say about the Jesuits?  Something very telling.