Twilight had come when again he rode out into the open.  Trapper’s Lake lay before him, a beautiful sheet of water, mirroring the black slopes and the fringed spruces and the flat peaks.  Over all its gray, twilight-softened surface showed little swirls and boils and splashes where the myriads of trout were rising.  The trail led out over open grassy shores, with a few pines straggling down to the lake, and clumps of spruces raising dark blurs against the background of gleaming lake.  Wade heard a sharp crack of hoofs on rock, and he knew he had disturbed deer at their drinking; also he heard a ring of horns on the branch of a tree, and was sure an elk was slipping off through the woods.  Across the lake he saw a camp-fire and a pale, sharp-pointed object that was a trapper’s tent or an Indian’s tepee.

Selecting a camp-site for himself, he unsaddled his horse, threw the pack off the other, and, hobbling both animals, he turned them loose.  His roll of bedding, roped in canvas tarpaulin, he threw under a spruce-tree.  Then he opened his oxhide-covered packs and laid out utensils and bags, little and big.  All his movements were methodical, yet swift, accurate, habitual.  He was not thinking about what he was doing.  It took him some little time to find a suitable log to split for fire-wood, and when he had started a blaze night had fallen, and the light as it grew and brightened played fantastically upon the isolating shadows.

Lid and pot of the little Dutch oven he threw separately upon the sputtering fire, and while they heated he washed his hands, mixed the biscuits, cut slices of meat off the deer haunch, and put water on to boil.  He broiled his meat on the hot, red coals, and laid it near on clean pine chips, while he waited for bread to bake and coffee to boil.  The smell of wood-smoke and odorous steam from pots and the fragrance of spruce mingled together, keen, sweet, appetizing.  Then he ate his simple meal hungrily, with the content of the man who had fared worse.

After he had satisfied himself he washed his utensils and stowed them away, with the bags.  Whereupon his movements acquired less dexterity and speed.  The rest hour had come.  Still, like the long-experienced man in the open, he looked around for more to do, and his gaze fell upon his weapons, lying on his saddle.  His rifle was a Henry—­shiny and smooth from long service and care.  His small gun was a Colt’s 45.  It had been carried in a saddle holster.  Wade rubbed the rifle with his hands, and then with a greasy rag which he took from the sheath.  After that he held the rifle to the heat of the fire.  A squall of rain had overtaken him that day, wetting his weapons.  A subtle and singular difference seemed to show in the way he took up the Colt’s.  His action was slow, his look reluctant.  The small gun was not merely a thing of steel and powder and ball.  He dried it and rubbed it with care, but not with love, and then he stowed it away.