The other shook his head.  “There was a lot more in it than that.”

“You meant to take the only means there were—­to carry off the sled that I couldn’t pull any farther——­” The Boy looked up quickly.  Something stern and truth-compelling in the dark face forced the Colonel to add:  “And along with the sled you meant to carry off—­the—­the things that meant life to us.”

“Just that——­” The Boy knotted his brown fingers in Nig’s hair as if to keep tight hold of one friend in the wreck.

“We couldn’t divide,” the Colonel hurried on.  “It was a case of crawlin’ on together, and, maybe, come out alive, or part and one die sure.”

The Boy nodded, tightening his lips.

“I knew well enough you’d fight for the off-chance.  But”—­the Colonel came away from the door and stood in front of his companion—­“so would I. I hadn’t really given up the struggle.”

“You were past strugglin’, and I would have left you sick——­”

“You wouldn’t have left me—­if I’d had my gun.”

The Boy remembered that he had more than suspected that at the time, but the impression had by-and-by waxed dim.  It was too utterly unlike the Colonel—­a thing dreamed.  He had grown as ashamed of the dream as of the thing he knew was true.  The egotism of memory absorbed itself in the part he himself had played—­that other, an evil fancy born of an evil time.  And here was the Colonel saying it was true.  The Boy dropped his eyes.  It had all happened in the night.  There was something in the naked truth too ghastly for the day.  But the Colonel went on in a harsh whisper: 

“I looked round for my gun; if I’d found it I’d have left you behind.”

And the Boy kept looking down at Nig, and the birds sang, and the locust whirred, and the hot sun filled the tent as high-tide flushes a sea-cave.

“You’ve been a little hard on me, Boy, bringin’ it up like this—­remindin’ me—­I wouldn’t have gone on myself, and makin’ me admit——­”

“No, no, Colonel.”

“Makin’ me admit that before I would have let you go on I’d have shot you!”

“Colonel!” He loosed his hold of Nig.

“I rather reckon I owe you my life—­and something else besides”—­the Colonel laid one hand on the thin shoulder where the pack-strap pressed, and closed the other hand tight over his pardner’s right—­“and I hadn’t meant even to thank you neither.”

“Don’t, for the Lord’s sake, don’t!” said the younger, and neither dared look at the other.

A scratching on the canvas, the Northern knock at the door.

“You fellers sound awake?”

A woman’s voice.  Under his breath, “Who the devil’s that?” inquired the Colonel, brushing his hand over his eyes.  Before he got across the tent Maudie had pushed the flap aside and put in her head.

“Hello!”

“Hell-o!  How d’e do?”

He shook hands, and the younger man nodded, “Hello.”