“That’s known as the sleeve trick, boys,” explained Aldous with his imperturbable smile.  “It’s a relic of the old gun-fighting days when the best man was quickest.  From now on, especially at night, I shall carry this little friend of mine just inside my wristband.  There are eleven shots in it, and I shoot fairly straight.  Good-day!”

Before they had recovered from their astonishment he was gone.

He did not follow the road along which Joanne had come a short time before, but turned again into the winding trail that led riverward through the poplars.  Where before he had been a little amused at himself, he was now more seriously disgusted.  He was not afraid of Quade, who was perhaps the most dangerous man along the line of rail.  Neither was he afraid of the lawless men who worked his ends.  But he knew that he had made powerful enemies, and all because of an unknown woman whom he had never seen until half an hour before.  It was this that disturbed his equanimity—­the woman of it, and the knowledge that his interference had been unsolicited and probably unnecessary.  And now that he had gone this far he found it not easy to recover his balance.  Who was this Joanne Gray? he asked himself.  She was not ordinary—­like the hundred other women who had gone on ahead of her to Tete Jaune Cache.  If she had been that, he would soon have been in his little shack on the shore of the river, hard at work.  He had planned work for himself that afternoon, and he was nettled to discover that his enthusiasm for the grand finale of a certain situation in his novel was gone.  Yet for this he did not blame her.  He was the fool.  Quade and his friends would make him feel that sooner or later.

His trail led him to a partly dry muskeg bottom.  Beyond this was a thicker growth of timber, mostly spruce and cedar, from behind which came the rushing sound of water.  A few moments more and he stood with the wide tumult of the Athabasca at his feet.  He had chosen this spot for his little cabin because the river ran wild here among the rocks, and because pack-outfits going into the southward mountains could not disturb him by fording at this point.  Across the river rose the steep embankments that shut in Buffalo Prairie, and still beyond that the mountains, thick with timber rising billow on billow until trees looked like twigs, with gray rock and glistening snow shouldering the clouds above the last purple line.  The cabin in which he had lived and worked for many weeks faced the river and the distant Saw Tooth Range, and was partly hidden in a clump of jack-pines.  He opened the door and entered.  Through the window to the south and west he could see the white face of Mount Geikie, and forty miles away in that wilderness of peaks, the sombre frown of Hardesty; through it the sun came now, flooding his work as he had left it.  The last page of manuscript on which he had been working was in his typewriter.  He sat down to begin where he had left off in that pivotal situation in his masterpiece.