his bunk; and not once, but many times,
he got up and dressed and went outside, stumbling around in the brush,
over the rocks--anything to change his thoughts.

He tried his utmost to put her out of his mind, yet as he plodded on his
snow-shoes, along his fifteen-mile trap line, either actively or
subconsciously his thoughts were of her. He could no longer imagine
himself feeling anything more than a mild interest in any other woman.
He loved her with the same concentration of affection that he had loved
his mother.

Bruce had formed the habit of wondering what she would think of this and
that--of imagining how she would look--what she would say--and so all
through the summer she had been associated with the work. He had
anticipated the time when he should be showing her the rapids with the
moonlight shining on the foam, the pink and amber sunsets behind the
umbrella tree, and when the wind blew among the pines of listening with
her to the sounds that were like Hawaiian music in the distance.

Now, try as he would, he could not rid himself of the habit, and, as he
pushed his way among the dark underbrush of creeks, he was always
thinking that she, too, would love that "woodsy" smell; that she, too,
would find delight in the frozen waterfalls and the awesome stillness of
the snow-laden pines.

But just so often as he allowed his imagination rein, just so often he
came back to earth doubly heavy-hearted, for the chance that she would
ever share his pleasure in these things seemed to grow more remote as
the days went by.

Bruce had built himself a shelter at the end of his trap-line that
consisted merely of poles and pine boughs leaned against a rim-rock.
Under this poor protection, wrapped in a blanket, with his feet toward
the fire at the entrance and his back against the wall, he spent many a
wretched night. Sometimes he dozed a little, but mostly wide-eyed, he
counted the endless hours waiting for the dawn.

During the summer when things had continually gone wrong Bruce had found
some comfort in recounting the difficulties which his hero of the
Calumet and Hecla had gone through in the initial stages of the
development of that great mine. But that time had passed, for, while
Alexander Agassiz had had his struggles, Bruce told himself with a
shadowy smile, he never had been up against a deal like this! there was
no record that he ever had had to lie out under a rim-rock when the
thermometer stood twenty and twen