t me to try it out? What about it?"

During the first part of his brother's speech, Pete had faced him, but
in the middle he had turned his back and stood in front of one of the
clumsy windows. He looked out now at a white wall of snow, above which
shone the dazzle of the midday. He whistled very softly to himself and
sank his hands deep into the pockets of his corduroys. He did not answer
the snarling question, but his wide, quiet mouth, exquisitely shaped,
ran into a smile and a dimple, deep and narrow, cut into his thin and
ruddy cheek.

Between the woman, who went on with her work as though no one had come
into the room, and the silent smiling youth, Hugh Garth prowled the
floor like a shadow thrown by a moving light.

He was a man of forty-five, gray-haired, misshapen, heavy above the
waist and light to meanness below; a man lame in one leg and with an
ill-proportioned face, malicious, lined, lead-colored; a man who limped
and leaped about the room with a fierce energy, the while his tongue,
gifted with a rich and resonant voice, poured vitriol upon the silence.

Suddenly the woman spoke. She turned back on the threshold of the
kitchen door through which her work had been taking her to and fro
during Garth's outbreak. Her voice was monotonous and smothered; it had
its share in her unnatural self-repression.

"Why don't you tell him to be quiet, Pete? You've been chopping wood
since daybreak to make up for what he didn't do last week, and you only
came in about ten minutes before he did. Why don't you speak out? You're
getting to be pretty close to a man now, and it isn't suitable for you
to let yourself be talked to that way. You always stand like a fool and
take it from him."

Pete turned. "Oh, well," he answered good-humoredly, "I guess maybe he's
tired. Let up, Hugh, will you? I'll finish your boot after dinner."

"The hell you will! You'll do it now!" Venting on his brother his anger
at the woman's intervention, Garth swung his misshapen body around the
end of the table and thrust an elbow violently against Pete's chest.
The attack was so unexpected that Pete staggered, lost his balance, and
stepping down into the shallow depression of a pebbled hearth, fell,
twisting his ankle. The agony was sharp. After a dumb minute he lifted
a white face and pulled himself up, one hand clutching the board mantel.
"Now you've done it!" he said between his teeth. "How will you get your
pelts to the station now? I won't