le he backed to the bed and
sat down, but he kept the gun pointed toward the door and the window.
A skunk came prowling through the trampled snow before the cabin,
hunting food where Mike had thrown out slops from the cooking. It
rattled a tin can against a half-buried rock, and Mike was on his
feet, shaking with cold and excitement.

"Oh, I c'n hear yuh, all right!" he shouted fiercely, not because he
was brave, but because he was scared and could not await calmly the
next move. "Don't yuh come around here, er I'll shoot!"

In a minute he thought he heard stealthy footsteps nearing the door,
and without taking any particular aim he lifted the hammer of the gun
and pulled the trigger, in a panicky instinct to fight. The odor that
assailed his nostrils reassured him suffocatingly. It was not the
spies after all.

He put down the gun then, convinced that if the spies had been hanging
around, they would know now that he was ready for them, and would not
dare tackle him that night. He felt vaingloriously equal to them all.
Let them come! He'd show 'em a thing or two.

Groping in the dark to the old cookstove, Mike raked together the
handful of pitch-pine shavings which he had whittled that morning for
his dinner fire. He reached up to the shelf where the matches were
kept, lighted the shavings, laid them carefully in the firebox and fed
the little blaze with dry splinters. He placed wood upon the crackling
pile, rattled the stove-lids into place and crouched shivering beside
the stove, trying to absorb some warmth into his chilled old bones. He
opened the oven door, hitched himself closer and thrust his numbed
feet into the oven. He sat there mumbling threats and puny warnings,
and so coaxed a little warmth into his courage as well as his body.

So he passed the rest of that night, huddled close to the stove,
hearing the murmur of his enemies in the uneasy swashing together of
the pine branches overhead, reading a signal into every cry of the
animals that prowled through the woods. The harsh squall of a mountain
lion, somewhere down the creek, set him shivering. He did not believe
it was a mountain lion, but the call of those who watched his cabin.
So daylight found him mumbling beside the stove, his old rifle across
his knees with the muzzle pointing toward the nailed door.

He wished that Murphy would come; and in the next moment he was
cursing Murphy for being half in league with the plotters, and hoping
Murphy ne