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"I won't believe him, I won't believe him," she told herself. Her thought turned to other channels, and her heart spoke its wish. "Wherever he is sometime he'll come to me." At a little town at the end of steel Ben and Ezram ended the first lap of their journey. They had had good traveling these past days.
Before we go any further, tell me what service I've done you, what obligation you're under to me, that gives me a right to accept so much from you?" It might have been in the moonlight that Ezram's eyes glittered perceptibly. "You're in my charge," he grinned. "I guess you ain't got any say comin'." "Wait wait." Ben sprang to his feet, and caught by his earnestness, Ezram got up too.
If they didn't shoot to kill at first sight of him Ezram would have time in plenty to seek refuge in the forest and do a sharpshooter's business that would fill his old heart with joy. And there really wasn't any question as to which of the two should go. Their partnership was of long duration; their comradeship was deep; Ben was young, and Ezram himself was old!
You got me out of prison, you wakened hope and self-respect in me when I thought they were dead, and you've proved a friend when I'd given up any thought of ever knowing human friendship again. I was down and out, Ezram. Anything you want me to do I'll do to the last ditch. You know I can fight you know how a man can fight if it's his last chance.
He himself cut the boughs for their beds, laid them with his remembered skill, spread the blankets, and kept the fire blazing while Ezram cooked; afterwards he knew the indescribable peace of a pipe smoke beside the glowing coals. He saw the moon come up at last, translating the spruce forest into a fairy land. Of course he had remembered the moon.
And for a ridiculously small sum which he mysteriously produced from the pocket of his faded jeans Ezram bought a second-hand rifle an ancient gun of large caliber but of enduring quality and a box of shells to match. "Old Hiram left me a gun, but we'll each need one," Ezram explained. "And they tell me there's a chance to pick up game, like as not, goin' down the river."
"But you'll get acquainted soon enough " "I've got a letter to a feller named Morris," Ezram replied. "And I've heard of one or two more men too Jeffery Neilson was one of 'em " "You'll find Morris in town all right," the stranger ventured to assure him. "He lives right next to Neilson's. And say what do you know about this man Neilson?" "Oh, nothin' at all. Why?"
"The boys had reason a-plenty for callin' you that," Ezram told him. "Up here, as you know, men don't get no complimentary epithets unless they deserve 'em. Some men, Ben, are like weasels. You've seen 'em. You've seen human rats, too. As if the souls they carried around with 'em was the souls of rats. Of course you remember 'Grizzly' Silverdale?
The same sky line of dark, heaven-reaching spruce had fronted him of old. He sprang up, his eyes blazing. "I remember everything," an inaudible voice spoke within him. Then he whispered, fervently, to his familiar wilds. "And I have come home." Everything was as it should be, as he and Ezram made the camp.
It occurred to him that perhaps the old man had discovered, at a distance, the presence of the claim-jumpers; and was merely waiting in the thickets for a chance to take action. If such were the case, sooner or later they could join their fortunes again. It was also easy to imagine that Ezram had lost his way on the journey out.
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