away at
the dripping roots of lily-pads. There were deer, also, and he caught
sight of one or two big bull-moose but forebore to shoot, for the
antlers were still in velvet and there was not enough snow on the
ground to sledge the great carcasses home. He contented himself with a
couple of bucks, which he carried home and divided with his few
neighbors, also bringing some of the meat to Stefan's wife at
Carcajou. Later on he killed two of the big flathorns, hung the huge
quarters to convenient trees and went back to Papineau's, the
Frenchman's place, for the loan of his dog-team.

After this came the winter with heavy falls of snow and cold that sent
the tinted alcohol in the thermometer at the station down very close
to the bulb. Carcajou and its inhabitants seemed to go to sleep. The
village street was generally deserted. Even the dogs stayed indoors
most of the day, hugging the cast-iron stoves. At this time all the
Indians were away at their winter hunting grounds, and many of the
lumberjacks had gone further south where the weather did not prevent
honest toil. The big sawmill was utterly silent and the river, wont to
race madly beneath the railroad bridge, had become a jumbled mass of
ice and rock.

The only men who kept up steady work in and near Carcajou formed the
section gang on the railroad. One day, in the middle of winter, and in
quickly gathering shadows, Pete Coogan, their foreman, was walking the
track back towards the village and had reached the big cut whose other
end led to the bridge at Carcajou. The wind bit hard as it howled
through the opening in the hill and the man walked wearily, pulling
away at a short and extinct pipe and thinking of little but the
comfort that would be his after he reached his little house and kicked
off his heavy Dutch stockings. A hot and hearty meal would be ready
for him, and after this he would light another pipe and listen to his
wife's account of the village doings. Since before daylight he had
been toiling hard with his men, in a place where tons of ice and snow
had thundered down a mountainside and covered the rails, four or five
feet deep. The work had been hurried, breathless, anxious, but finally
they had been able to remove the warning signals after clearing the
track in time to let the eastbound freight thunder by, with a lowing
of cold, starved cattle tightly packed and a squealing of hogs by the
legion. A frost-encased man had waived a thickly-mittened hand