Empty Hands by Stringer Arthur

Author:Stringer, Arthur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, adventure, wilderness, Canada
Publisher: Distributed Proofreaders Canada
Published: 1924-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER XV

So studiously impersonal was Shomer Grimshaw's attitude toward his wilderness companion, during the next few days, that Claire found something provocative in his quietness.

"Isn't this spiffy?" she flippantly demanded of him after making a jelly of fawn-knuckles and tinting it pink with raspberry juice.

"It's very good," he conceded.

"And I'm not altogether a bone-head, am I?"

"You are a very wonderful woman," he acknowledged as his cogitative eye met hers.

"In what way?" she inquired. And if beyond her mask of flippancy he detected a deeper human craving for approval he betrayed no evidence of that discovery.

"You have a quick and restless mind," he told her, "and you learn things easily. And inside your burr of audacity you still have the milk of good breeding."

She swept him with a quick glance. Then she sat silent, for a full minute.

"I wish you wouldn't be so stilted," she suddenly announced, with an unlooked-for touch of sharpness.

"It's hard," was his deliberated reply, "for an old dog to learn new tricks."

"You don't impress me as overpoweringly old."

"But there are times when you impress me as devastatingly young," asserted her solemn-eyed companion. He seemed impervious to her raillery.

"That's something time will cure," she asserted with mock meekness.

"Along with other things, I hope!"

"Are you lecturing me?" she demanded, letting an indolently hostile eye meet his. She had the satisfaction of seeing his color deepen, though he remained silent. And she resented that silence.

"I wonder," she said with an achieved dreaminess of tone, "if you are really nursing a broken heart, or if that solemn manner grew out of being a camp-boss for so long?"

When he spoke, he spoke very slowly.

"It's going to be hard for us to get along out here, even by observing all the rules of the game. And if we keep up this sort of thing and get on each other's nerves—"

"It'll be just plain hell," she cut in, her solemnity once again touched with insolence. And it was not until she saw that his fingers were trembling, for all his quietness, that she grew repentant. "I don't want to gum the game, of course, but I do wish you'd warm up a trifle."

She did not altogether discard her mask of flippancy, during the days that followed, but she did her best "not to gum the game." For conditions soon justified Grimshaw's impatience to see his cabin built. A change came in the weather, bringing with it a cold northeast wind and a steady downpour of rain. And during this downpour the two castaways found themselves practically confined to their shelter. Grimshaw, it is true, worked steadily enough on the smaller tasks before him, such as regrinding his knives and fitting a better haft to his ax-head and fashioning for Claire a cross-bow which, he concluded, would be more effective in the shooting of small game. As for Claire herself, she found plenty to do in the patching of torn footwear and the shaping of fresh moccasins and the sewing together of rabbit-skin clothing.

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