the twigs.

"Do you think you could sleep there?" he said.

The girl glanced at the twigs. They looked soft and springy, and had a
pleasant aromatic fragrance, while the covering sheet was thick.

"I know I could not walk eight miles," she said. "Where has our
accomplished companion gone to?"

Deringham laughed. "To look for something for supper in the bush, I
believe," he said. "I also fancy if there is anything eatable in the
vicinity he will find it."

The snows above had lost their brilliancy, and it was dark below, when
the teamster returned with several fine trout which he skewered upon a
barberry stem. He also brought a deerhide bag from the wagon, and
presently announced that supper was ready, while Alice Deringham, who
long afterwards remembered that meal, enjoyed it considerably more than
she would have believed herself capable of doing a few days earlier.
She had travelled far in search of something new, and this was the
first time she had tasted the biting green tea with the reek of the
smoke about it from a blackened pannikin. Grindstone bread baked in a
hole in the ground was also a novelty, and the crumbling flakes of
salmon smoked by some Siwash Indian a delicacy, while she wondered if
it was only the keen mountain air which made the flesh of the big trout
so good, or whether it owed anything to skilful cookery.

There was also, by way of background, the glow of the fire flickering
athwart the great columnar trunks which ran up into the dimness above
her, and the cold glimmer of the snows with a pale star beyond them
when the red flame sank, while the hoarse roar of an unseen river
emphasized the silence. At first she felt there was something unreal
and theatrical about it all. The light that blazed up and died, awful
serenity of the snow, and the vast impenetrable shadows filled with
profound silence, seemed all part of a fervidly-imagined spectacle; but
as the silence deepened and gained upon her the position was reversed,
and she seemed to feel that this was the reality, the environment man
was created for, and she, wrapped in the tinsel of civilization, out of
place in the primeval wilderness. Her father, immaculate as ever in
his travelling tweeds, with his lean, pallid face, also jarred upon the
picture, and Harry the teamster, bronzed by frost and sun, with the
stain of the soil upon him, alone a part of its harmonies. They seemed
no longer harsh and barbaric, but vast and subtle,