ls drew a
hand from a comfortable pocket to lay it encouragingly on his neck, at
which familiar caress the pony would throw up his head and step out
faster for some paces. Talbot felt sorry for the little beast toiling
along under his heavy though carefully packed burden of stores, cans of
oil, loaves, and every sort of miscellaneous provisions, and would have
spoken cheeringly to it, but his lips felt too stiff and painful to form
the words, and so man and brute toiled along in silence over the trail
under the angry sky. As he walked, Talbot's thoughts went back
involuntarily to the picture of Stephen sitting smoking by the stove in
the snug interior of Bill Winters' cabin; he felt instinctively, as
surely as if he had seen it, that he would so sit through the
afternoon, and by evening he would be finding his way down to the
nearest saloon and pass the hours there with Katrine; and he compared
him vaguely with himself, tired with tramping through the town from
store to store, half frozen while he stood to pack the pony, and now
labouring up alone to his cabin in the gulch.

He wondered dimly whether it would turn out that he should ever realise
a reward for his toil, whether he should live to get out of this icy
corner of the world, or whether he should die and rot here, caught in
this great snow-trap, in this open grave, where the living were buried.
He wondered a little, but his mind was not one inclined to abstract
thought. He spent very little time in retrospection, reflection, and
contemplation, very little time in thinking of any sort, and on this
account possessed so great a stock of energy for acting. Each human
being has only a certain amount of energy supplied him with which to do
the work of his life. Thinking, speaking, and acting are all portions of
this work, and whatever of his energy he consumes in any one, so much
the less has he for the others. Thinking, the formation of ideas, is
hard work; speaking, the expression of ideas, is hard work; and acting,
the carrying out of ideas, is hard work. It is false to suppose that the
first two are natural, instinctive, involuntary movements of the brain,
and that only the last requires effort.

Talbot thought very little and spoke very little. His ideas came to him
in simple form; they were not elaborated in his mind nor in his speech,
they turned into actions immediately or died quietly without giving him
any trouble or wasting his time. A decision once made h