of the stove, and melted snow dripping from the black stockings rolled up to the knee, and the white ones rolled down over the moccasins. His fur coat and his cap were flung on the floor, and his unshaven chin was sunk in his tunic-collar. One hand, knotted in a rough bandage, hung over the chair-arm, and the whole of him told out that slackness of fibre which is born of bitter, unresting strain.
Jennifer knew just a little concerning that strain, for Kennedy's youth would not be denied some heroics. And yet the reserve of his new-come manhood had set his tongue rather to such things as the searing of Dick's wound by a red-hot bolt and the pulling of the teams in a blizzard than to his own glory. And of the things which were the real essentials he had neither the wit nor the understanding to speak. But Jennifer was learning to interpret knowledge by that which is not said. She moved a little from the slow-breathing man with his dark hair damp with sweat and the deep lines round his mouth, and she looked from the dulling window on the lives whereto such men came.
There had been a policeman of the West who bore his man south from Chipewyan against the full blast of the winter; a maniac prisoner and a hard-bitten officer who paid for those days of strain by the loss of his own senses. There was one at whom a "Cowboy Jack pointed a gun against section 105 of the Criminal Code," and who "unfortunately destroyed one chair" in the struggle of capture. There was the rider of the prairie-patrol who brought the wife and children of a settler from the stinging smoke and the flames that ringed them as surely as ever fires ringed in Brunhild. There was the other who walked in the serenity which is given of God or devils through the Indian camp squatted in vivid objection across the projected line of a railroad, and dispersed the thunder and gathering lightning by the simple methodical directness with which he kicked down the tepees, one by one, in an unbroken silence. And there were a thousand more whose life-work lay, bald and unvarnished, in the blue-backed Annual Reports which the world never reads.
There was something of the old Norse grim humour in
