of his tump-line or the unchanging yield of the water to his paddle, resented the placidity of the older man, above all resented the meek and pathetic submissiveness of the girl.  His narrow eyes concentrated their gaze ominously.  He muttered to himself.  The untrained, instinctive strength of the man’s spirit fretted against delay.  His enthusiasm, the fire of his hope, urged him to earn his self-approval by great exertion.  Great exertion was impossible.  Always, day by day, night by night, he chafed at the snail-like pace with which things moved, chafed at the delay imposed by the nature of the quest, the policy of the old man, the presence of the girl.  Only, in the rudimentary processes of his intelligence, he confused the three in one, and the presence of the girl alone received the brunt of his sullen displeasure.  In the splendour of his strength, head down, heart evil, restrained to a bitter obedience only by the knowledge that he could do nothing alone, he broke through the opposing wilderness.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sam Bolton gauged perfectly the spirit in his comrade, but paid it little attention.  He knew it as a chemical reaction of a certain phase of forest travel.  It argued energy, determination, dogged pluck when the need should arise, and so far it was good.  The woods life affects various men in various ways, but all in a manner peculiar to itself.  It is a reagent unlike any to be found in other modes of life.  The moment its influence reaches the spirit, in that moment does the man change utterly from the person he has been in other and ordinary surroundings; and the instant he emerges from its control he reverts to his accustomed bearing.  But in the dwelling of the woods he becomes silent.  It may be the silence of a self-contained sufficiency; the silence of an equable mind; the silence variously of awe, even of fear; it may be the silence of sullenness.  This, as much as the vast stillness of the wilderness, has earned for the region its designation of the Silent Places.

Nor did the older woodsman fear any direct results from the younger’s very real, though baseless, anger.  These men were bound together by something stronger than any part of themselves.  Over them stood the Company, and to its commands all other things gave way.  No matter how rebellious might be Dick Herron’s heart, how ruffled the surface of his daily manner, Bolton knew perfectly well he would never for a single instant swerve in his loyalty to the main object of the expedition.  Serene in this consciousness, the old woodsman dwelt in a certain sweet and gentle rumination of his own.  Among the finer instincts of his being many subtle mysteries of the forest found their correspondences.  The feeling of these satisfied him entirely, though of course he was incapable of their intellectualisation.