"

"Bees'n Lake!" cried Jimmy fiercely through an aperture of the door.

"You'll find th' boardin'-house just across over the track," said the
woodsman, holding out his hand, "so long. See you again if you don't
find a job with the Old Fellow. My name's Shearer."

"Mine is Thorpe," replied the other. "Thank you."

The woodsman stepped forward past the carousers to the baggage
compartment, where he disappeared. The revellers stumbled out the other
door.

Thorpe followed and found himself on the frozen platform of a little
dark railway station. As he walked, the boards shrieked under his feet
and the sharp air nipped at his face and caught his lungs. Beyond the
fence-rail protection to the side of the platform he thought he saw the
suggestion of a broad reach of snow, a distant lurking forest, a few
shadowy buildings looming mysterious in the night. The air was twinkling
with frost and the brilliant stars of the north country.

Directly across the track from the railway station, a single building
was picked from the dark by a solitary lamp in a lower-story room.
The four who had descended before Thorpe made over toward this light,
stumbling and laughing uncertainly, so he knew it was probably in the
boarding-house, and prepared to follow them. Shearer and the station
agent,--an individual much muffled,--turned to the disposition of some
light freight that had been dropped from the baggage car.

The five were met at the steps by the proprietor of the boarding-house.
This man was short and stout, with a harelip and cleft palate, which at
once gave him the well-known slurring speech of persons so afflicted,
and imparted also to the timbre of his voice a peculiarly hollow,
resonant, trumpet-like note. He stumped about energetically on a wooden
leg of home manufacture. It was a cumbersome instrument, heavy, with
deep pine socket for the stump, and a projecting brace which passed
under a leather belt around the man's waist. This instrument he used
with the dexterity of a third hand. As Thorpe watched him, he drove in a
projecting nail, kicked two "turkeys" dexterously inside the open door,
and stuck the armed end of his peg-leg through the top and bottom of the
whisky jug that one of the new arrivals had set down near the door. The
whisky promptly ran out. At this the cripple flirted the impaled jug
from the wooden leg far out over the rail of the verandah into the snow.

A growl went up.

"What'n hell's that for I!"