“Non!” he exclaimed, with a ferocious frown.  “You don’t get so much as li’l smell.  You t’ink ma soeur goin’ hongry to feed loafer’ lak you?” Bushy gray tails began to stir, the heads came farther forward, there was a most unmannerly licking of chops.  “By Gar!  You sound lak’ miner-man eatin’ soup.  Wat for you’spect nice grub?  You don’ work none.”  ’Poleon removed a layer of fat, divided it, and tossed a portion to each animal.  The morsels vanished with a single gulp, with one wolfish click of sharp white teeth, “No, I give you not’in’.”

For no reason whatever the speaker broke into loud laughter; then, to further relieve his bubbling joyousness, he began to hum a song.  As he worked his song grew louder, until its words were audible to the girl in the next tent.

“Oh, la voix du beau Nord qui m’appelle, Pour benir avec lui le jour, Et desormais toute peine cruelle Fuira devant mon chant d’amour.  D’amour, d’amour.” ("Oh, the voice of the North is a-calling me, To join in the praise of the day, So whatever the fate that’s befalling me, I’ll sing every sorrow away.  Away, away.”)

The Yukon stove was red-hot now, and Rouletta Kirby’s tent was warm.  She seated herself before a homely little dresser fashioned from two candle-boxes, and began to arrange her hair.  Curiously she examined the comb and brush.  They were, or had been, ’Poleon’s; so was the pocket-mirror hanging by a safety-pin to the canvas wall above.  Rouletta recalled with a smile the flourish of pride with which he had presented to her this ludicrous bureau and its fittings.  Was there ever such a fellow as this Doret?  Was there ever a heart so big, so kind?  A stranger, it seemed to the girl that she had known him always.  There had been days—­days interminable—­when he had seemed to be some dream figure; an indistinct, unreal being at once familiar and unfamiliar, friendly and forbidding; then other days during which he had gradually assumed substance and actuality and during which she had come to know him.  Following her return to sanity, Rouletta had experienced periods of uncertainty and of terror, then hours of embarrassment the mere memory of which caused her to shrink and to hide her head.  Those were times of which, even yet, she could not bear to think.  Hers had been a slow recovery and a painful, nay a tragic, awakening, but, as she had gained the strength and the ability to understand and to suffer, ’Poleon, with a tact and a thoughtfulness unexpected in one of his sort, had dropped the character of nurse and assumed the role of friend and protector.  That had been Rouletta’s most difficult ordeal, the most trying time for both of them, in fact; not one man in ten thousand could have carried off such an awkward situation at a cost so low to a woman’s feelings.  It was, of course, the very awkwardness of that situation, together with ’Poleon’s calm, courageous method of facing it, that had given his patient the strength to meet him half-way and that had made her convalescence anything less than a torture.