Bat was watching him interestedly.  And at sight of his final attitude he broke into one of his infrequent chuckles and flung himself into a chair.

“Say, what in—?  Feeling cold?” he demanded.

Bull’s hands were promptly withdrawn, and, in spite of his mood, a half smile at his own expense lit his troubled eyes.

“That’s all right,” he said.  “It’s on me, sure.  I guess my head must be full of those figures still.”

He returned to the window and stood with his back to his companion.  Bat watched him for some moments.

Bull had changed considerably in the last few weeks.  The lumberman had been swift to observe it.  Somehow the old enthusiasm had faded out.  The keen fighting nature he had become accustomed to, with its tendency to swift, almost reckless action, had become less marked.  The man was altogether less buoyant.

At first it had seemed to Bat’s searching mind as if the effects of that desperate trip through the forests, and the subsequent battle down at the mill, had left its mark upon him, had somehow wrought one of those curious, weakening changes in the spirit of the man which seemed so unaccountable.  Later, however, he dismissed the idea for a shrewder and better understanding.

He helped himself to a chew of tobacco and kicked a cuspidore within his reach.

“The fire-bugs are out,” he said.  “The last of ’em.  I jest got word through.  It’s the seventh.  An’ it’s the tally.”

It was a sharp, matter-of-fact statement.  He was telling of a human killing, and there was no softening.

Bull nodded.  He glanced over his shoulder.

“You mean—?”

“They shot five of ’em to death.  The last two they hanged.”  A grim set of the jaws, as Bat made the announcement, was his only expression of feeling.

“Makes you wonder,” he went on, after a pause.  “Makes you think of the days when locomotives didn’t run.  Makes you think of the days when life was just a pretty mean gamble with most of the odds dead against you.  It don’t sound like these Sunday School days when the world sits around, framed in a fancy-coloured halo, that couldn’t stand for any wash-tub, talkin’ brotherhood an’ human sympathy.  It’s tough when you think of the bunch that sent those boys to fire our limits.  They knew the full crime of it, and knew the thing it would mean if we got hands on ’em.  Well, there it is.  We got ’em.  An’ now ther’ ain’t a mother’s son of ’em left alive to tell the yarn of it all.  It’s been just cold, bloody murder.  An’ the murder ain’t on us.  No, I guess the darn savage eatin’ hashed missioner ain’t as bad a proposition as the civilised guys who paid the price to get those toughs killed up in our forests.  I can’t feel no sort of regret.  It won’t hand me a half-hour nightmare.  But it makes me wonder.  It surely does.”

He spat accurately into the cuspidore.

“Does the report hand you anything else?” Bull asked, without turning.  The other noticed the complete lack of real interest.  He shrugged.