She stepped out on the slippery rocks and helped him heave up the canvas craft and tilt the water out.  On either side uprose bare wet walls of rock.  A heavy sleet was falling steadily, through which a few streaming caches showed in the gathering darkness.

“You’d better hurry up,” he advised, thanking her for the assistance and relaunching the boat.  “Two miles of stiff trail from here to Happy Camp.  No wood until you get there, so you’d best hustle along.  Good-by.”

Frona reached out and took his hand, and said, “You are a brave man.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”  He returned the grip with usury and looked his admiration.

A dozen tents held grimly to their pegs on the extreme edge of the timber line at Happy Camp.  Frona, weary with the day, went from tent to tent.  Her wet skirts clung heavily to her tired limbs, while the wind buffeted her brutally about.  Once, through a canvas wall, she heard a man apostrophizing gorgeously, and felt sure that it was Del Bishop.  But a peep into the interior told a different tale; so she wandered fruitlessly on till she reached the last tent in the camp.  She untied the flap and looked in.  A spluttering candle showed the one occupant, a man, down on his knees and blowing lustily into the fire-box of a smoky Yukon stove.

CHAPTER IV

She cast off the lower flap-fastenings and entered.  The man still blew into the stove, unaware of his company.  Frona coughed, and he raised a pair of smoke-reddened eyes to hers.

“Certainly,” he said, casually enough.  “Fasten the flaps and make yourself comfortable.”  And thereat returned to his borean task.

“Hospitable, to say the least,” she commented to herself, obeying his command and coming up to the stove.

A heap of dwarfed spruce, gnarled and wet and cut to proper stove-length, lay to one side.  Frona knew it well, creeping and crawling and twisting itself among the rocks of the shallow alluvial deposit, unlike its arboreal prototype, rarely lifting its head more than a foot from the earth.  She looked into the oven, found it empty, and filled it with the wet wood.  The man arose to his feet, coughing from the smoke which had been driven into his lungs, and nodding approval.

When he had recovered his breath, “Sit down and dry your skirts.  I’ll get supper.”

He put a coffee-pot on the front lid of the stove, emptied the bucket into it, and went out of the tent after more water.  As his back disappeared, Frona dived for her satchel, and when he returned a moment later he found her with a dry skirt on and wringing the wet one out.  While he fished about in the grub-box for dishes and eating utensils, she stretched a spare bit of rope between the tent-poles and hung the skirt on it to dry.  The dishes were dirty, and, as he bent over and washed them, she turned her back and deftly changed her stockings.  Her childhood had taught her the value of well-cared feet for the trail.  She put her wet shoes on a pile of wood at the back of the stove, substituting for them a pair of soft and dainty house-moccasins of Indian make.  The fire had now grown strong, and she was content to let her under-garments dry on her body.