Garry entered upon his new duties the following morning in a spirit
anything but reassuring to his companion. Up to that time he had made
his own industry the butt of much good-natured ridicule, viewing it
apparently as a sort of vacation novelty amusing enough while the
novelty lasted. But he went from task to task that next day in a
methodical, dogged fashion that was farthest of all from amiability.
Two or three times Steve, trying to spare him needless effort,
attempting to show him how to favor blistered hands and aching back,
met with rebuffs so curt that he learned to keep his advice to himself.
He knew what end Garry was working to achieve; he would have allowed
himself to smile over the thought that the other man would be tired
enough, before night came, without trying to make that work any harder,
only he did not dare venture that smile.

Times without number there were when Garry's monumental fit of sulks
bordered close on the ridiculous, but the needed triviality which would
have precipitated the whole fabric to a terra-firma of absurdity failed
to materialize. He cursed the rain, cursed it with his fluent
precision which already had earned Fat Joe's admiring comment. He
complained, querulously, like a half-aged boy, over the treacherous
footing which the flooded alder brakes afforded. And once when he had
felled a tree and narrowly missed being pinned beneath it, in spite of
Steve's quick leap that dragged him aside, he plunged into an incisive
diatribe concerning the perversity of inanimate things--a short
discussion in many-syllabled words which would have awakened Steve's
admiration by its very brilliance, had he not already been fully
concerned with the light of triumph which had flared and then died out
in Garry's eyes when the hemlock only grazed him.

Now and again Steve saw his lips move and then crook in cynical
amusement, and knew that Garry was talking to himself and finding such
communion most absorbing. But he waited, outwardly patient at least,
nor tried to hurry the issue. He knew the woods; he knew what the
silence and solitude could do. For no man endures mutely the spell of
the wilderness. He talks, or he goes mad. Put two men on a two-months
trail and, be they the worst of enemies, they will still find a topic
which each may approach. Trap them for a winter in a snow-buttressed
valley where no other man can penetrate and they will have bared
jealous secrets before spring s