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The one but appreciated the other, and all women of all the world appreciated by what Smoke saw in the soul of Labiskwee at Snass's fire in the snow-land. And Smoke learned about himself. He remembered back to all he knew of Joy Gastell, and he knew that he loved her. Yet he delighted in Labiskwee. And what was this feeling of delight but love? He could demean it by no less a name. Love it was.
"We are hundreds of miles to the north in the summer." But, strive as he would, Smoke could get no clew to Snass's history in the days before he came to live in the northern wilds. Educated he was, yet in all the intervening years he had read no books, no newspapers. What had happened in the world he knew not, nor did he show desire to know.
Dogs, full-kin to wolves, bristled up to Smoke to endure the menace of the short club he carried and to whiff the odor of this newcomer whom they must accept by virtue of the club. Segregated in the heart of the camp, Smoke came upon what was evidently Snass's fire. Though temporary in every detail, it was solidly constructed and was on a large scale.
Just the same, in the natural order of life, Margaret must marry some time." A pause fell; Smoke caught himself wondering for the thousandth time what Snass's history must be. "I am a harsh, cruel man," Snass went on. "Yet the law is the law, and I am just. Nay, here with this primitive people, I am the law and the justice. Beyond my will no man goes.
Also, I am a father, and all my days I have been cursed with imagination." Whither his monologue tended, Smoke did not learn, for it was interrupted by a burst of chiding and silvery laughter from Labiskwee's tent, where she played with a new-caught wolf-cub. A spasm of pain twitched Snass's face. "I can stand it," he muttered grimly.
That sniveling shrimp, McCan, deserted at the first shot. He'll never run away again. But my hunters have got your partner in the mountains, and they'll get him. He'll never make the Yukon basin. As for you, from now on you sleep at my fire. And there'll be no more scouting with the young men. I shall have my eye on you." Smoke's new situation at Snass's fire was embarrassing.
She looked off across the camp-smoke, sighed, and resumed work on the fur mitten she was sewing. "Well," she announced with finality, "I shall never get married anyway." "Once we hit out we'll sure have some tall runnin'," Shorty said dismally. "The place is a big trap," Smoke agreed. From the crest of a bald knob they gazed out over Snass's snowy domain.
I ain't squealed. You don't know nothing. Keep that in mind. Shorty went off on his own along with me." At Snass's fire Smoke found Labiskwee. She met him with eyes that shone with such softness and tenderness as to frighten him. "I'm glad you did not try to run away," she said. "You see, I " She hesitated, but her eyes didn't drop. They swam with a light unmistakable.
Shanghaied in San Francisco, he had deserted the whaleship at Point Barrow with three companions. Two had died, and the third had abandoned him on the terrible traverse south. Two years he had lived with the Eskimos before raising the courage to attempt the south traverse, and then, within several days of a Hudson Bay Company post, he had been gathered in by a party of Snass's young men.
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