Taking for granted that Trenholme was of gentle extraction, he treated him with the generosity of pride in the matter of rations; but he assumed airs of a testy authority which were in exact proportion to his own feeling of physical and social inferiority.  Seen truly, there was a pathos in this, for it was a weak man’s way of trying to be manful but his new labourer, could not be expected to see it in that light.  Then, too, on all impersonal subjects of conversation which arose, it was the nature of Bates to contradict and argue; whereas Trenholme, who had little capacity for reasonable argument, usually dealt with contradiction as a pot of gunpowder deals with an intruding spark.  As regarded the personal subject of his own misfortune—­a subject on which Trenholme felt he had a certain right to receive confidence—­Bates’s demeanour was like an iron mask.

Bates scorned the idea, which Turrif had always held, that Cameron had never really died; he vowed, as before, that the box he had sent in Saul’s cart had contained nothing but a dead body; he would hear no description of the old man who, it would seem, had usurped Cameron’s name; he repeated stolidly that Saul had put his charge into some shallow grave in the forest, and hoaxed Trenholme, with the help of an accomplice; and he did not scruple to hint that if Trenholme had not been a coward he would have seized the culprit, and so obviated further mystery and after difficulties.  There was enough truth in this view of the case to make it very insulting to Trenholme.  But Bates did not seem to cherish anger for that part of his trouble that had been caused by this defect; rather he showed an annoying indifference to the whole affair.  He had done what he could to bury his late partner decently; he neither expressed nor appeared to experience further emotion concerning his fate.

When a man has set himself to anything, he generally sticks to it, for a time at least; this seemed to be the largest reason that Trenholme had the first four weeks for remaining where he was.  At any rate, he did remain; and from these unpromising materials, circumstance, as is often the case, beat, out a rough sort of friendship between the two men.  The fact that Bates was a partial wreck, that the man’s nerve and strength in him were to some extent gone, bred in Trenholme the gallantry of the strong toward the weak—­a gallantry which was kept from rearing into self-conscious virtue by the superiority of Bates’s reasoning powers, which always gave him a certain amount of real authority.  Slowly they began to be more confidential.

“It’s no place for a young man like you to be here,” Bates observed with disfavour.

It was Sunday.  The two were sitting in front of the house in the sunshine, not because the sun was warm, but because it was bright; dressed, as they were, in many plies of clothes, they did not feel the cold, in flat, irregular shape the white lake lay beneath their hill.  On the opposite heights the spruce-trees stood up clear and green, as perfect often in shape as yews that are cut into old-fashioned cones.