This was not the first time such a thing had happened.  Why did he feel as if it was for him the end of the world?  He lay still an instant.  It would be happiness just to rest here and go to sleep.  The Colonel!  Oh, well, the Colonel had taken his rifle.  Funny there should be orange-trees up here.  He could smell them.  He shut his eyes.  Something shone red and glowing.  Why, that was the sun making an effect of stained glass as it shone through the fat pine weather-boarding of his little bedroom on the old place down in Florida.  Suddenly a face. Ah, that face! He must be up and doing.  He knew perfectly well how to get out of this damn hole.  You lie on your side and roll.  Gradually you pack the softness tight till it bears—­not if you stand up on your feet, but bears the length of your body, while you worm your way obliquely to the top, and feel gingerly in the dimness after your snow-shoes.

But if it happens on a pitch-dark night, and your pardner has chosen camp out of earshot, you feel that you have looked close at the end of the Long Trail.

On getting back to the fire, he found the Colonel annoyed at having called “Grub!” three times—­“yes, sah! three times, sah!”

And they ate in silence.

“Now I’m going to bed,” said the Boy, rising stiffly.

“You just wait a minute.”

“No.”

Now, the Colonel himself had enunciated the law that whenever one of them was ready to sleep the other must come too.  He didn’t know it, but it is one of the iron rules of the Winter Trail.  In absence of its enforcement, the later comer brings into the warmed up sleeping-bag not only the chill of his own body, he lets in the bitter wind, and brings along whatever snow and ice is clinging to his boots and clothes.  The melting and warming-up is all to be done again.

But the Colonel was angry.

“Most unreasonable,” he muttered—­“damned unreasonable!”

Worse than the ice and the wet in the sleeping-bag, was this lying in such close proximity to a young jackanapes who wouldn’t come when you called “Grub!” and wouldn’t wait a second till you’d felt about in the dimness for your gun.  Hideous to lie so close to a man who snored, and who’d deprived you of your 44 Marlin.  Although it meant life, the Boy grudged the mere animal heat that he gave and that he took.  Full of grudging, he dropped asleep.  But the waking spirit followed him into his dreams.  An ugly picture painted itself upon the dark, and struggling against the vision, he half awoke.  With the first returning consciousness came the oppression of the yoke, the impulse to match the mental alienation with that of the body—­strong need to move away.

You can’t move away in a sleeping-bag.

In a city you may be alone, free.

On the trail, you walk in bonds with your yoke-fellow, make your bed with him, with him rise up, and with him face the lash the livelong day.