The following Sunday was one of those rare winter days when the mercury
crawls out of its ball sufficiently to register a point or two. At noon
the silver column indicated only four below zero, and, accustomed to
sterner temperatures, the men lolled about the camp bare-headed and
shirt-sleeved. One hardy group was running a poker game on a blanket
under the sunny lea of a bunkhouse; the younger men, choppers and
teamsters, skylarked about the camp essaying feats of strength: some
tossed the caber, others put the shot, a third squad startled the forest
with the platoon fire of a whip-cracking contest. Standing in his
doorway, the cook, autocrat of the camp, remarked patronizingly on the
latter performance.
"Pretty fair," he judicially observed, as one young fellow raised the
echoes--"pretty fair, Carrots, but Sliver there has you beat. Needn't
to look so cocky, though, Sliver," he qualified his praise, "or I'll
call up Michigan to teach you how to crack a whip."
"Oh, shucks! I ain't scared o' him," Sliver grinned. Then, rising to
his slim height, he writhed body and arm and let forth a veritable _feu
de joie_.
"You would, would you?" the cook warned. "Here, Red!" he called to the
gamblers. "Get up an' give this kid a lesson."
"You go plumb to--" The location was drowned by Sliver's second volley.
"Oh, come, Red!" the cook urged. "This kid makes me tired."
The red teamster went on playing, and would, no doubt, have indefinitely
continued the game but that, looking up to curse the importunate cook,
he saw the stable roustabout interestedly watching the whip-crackers. A
man in years, the latter was a child in intellect, simple to the point
of half-wittedness. Picking him up, starving, in Winnipeg, Carter had
brought him up to the camp early in the winter, and ever since he had
served as a butt for the camp's jokes.