“I wonder when we shall see this lake again,” he said.

Alton, who was busy with the frypan, turned and stirred the fire, and the sparks and smoke whirled about them before a stinging blast.  “I don’t know,” he said, glancing at a smear of whiteness that swept athwart the lake.  “It depends upon the weather, and I’m not pleased with that to-night.  You see the Chinook winds would keep off the snow.”

“Of course,” said Seaforth, who knew that the warm breezes from the Pacific occasionally drive back the rigorous winter that turns the northern portion of the mountain province into a white desolation.  “They usually do, but we’ll surmise that in place of them we get the back-draughts from the Pole?”

“Then,” said Alton dryly, “it would be a good deal nicer down at Somasco.  Are you sorry you didn’t stop there, Charley?”

Seaforth threw an armful of fir wood upon the fire with somewhat unnecessary violence.  “You are not so pleasant as you might be to-night,” he said.

Alton rose and stretched himself.  “I wouldn’t worry about me.  It seems to me we are both of us feeling lonely, and that’s curious, because when we had him Okanagan wasn’t any special kind of a companionable man.  There was a time when you would have been driving to dinner with a diamond pin stuck in you and silk stockings on about this time, Charley?”

Seaforth laughed.  “I scarcely think either of the things are in common masculine use,” he said.  “There, however, was a time when I walked into a British Columbian mining camp with my whole wardrobe on my back and, I think, fifty cents in my pocket.  Still, what you ask me suggests a not quite unwarranted question.  What are you going to do with Carnaby, Harry?”

“I don’t know yet.  I’m not sure it’s mine, you see.”

“Your grandfather left it you,” said Seaforth; “and it was his.”

“Yes,” said Alton gravely.  “He did, but he tacked a kind of condition on to it, and—­well, that’s about all I can tell you, Charley.”

“Of course!” and Seaforth smiled curiously.  “I would not have asked you, only I am your partner, and when you’re Alton of Carnaby you will have no more use for me.”

Alton seemed to sigh.  “I am,” he said simply, “Alton of Somasco, and I fancy now and then that was all I was meant to be.  You are my partner, Charley, and it would take a good deal more than Carnaby to separate you and me.”

Seaforth smiled again, though there was more than amusement in his face, while Alton, who stopped beside the fire and filled two cans from the kettle, shook his head reproachfully as he flung their contents into the bush.

“That’s what comes of talking too much.  You have forgotten to put in the tea,” he said.

They lay down early, rolled in the blankets, with the tent across them, for the wind that lashed the lake rendered it advisable not to erect it, but it was some time before Seaforth went to sleep.  He fancied he understood Alton’s assertion that he was not sure Carnaby was his, for he knew his comrade was capable under certain conditions of almost reasonless generosity.  Nor did he desire a better partner, but he was not sure that in the event of Alton transferring his activities to England their friendship would be approved of by a possible mistress of Carnaby.  Women, Seaforth knew, regarded these things differently.