Dick looked at him through half-shut eyes, and the smile on his lips was unpleasant. He was too tired to allow it to any man—least of all to Tempest.
"You have got the right spirit for the North-West," he said suavely.
Tempest flushed. The golding western light was in his thick, bright hair, and the eager face which no weariness could blurr. He looked curiously vital with the shaggy forehead of the bank behind him in its red and yellow glory.
"Exactly," he said quietly. "I know when we have had enough."
"Ah," said Dick, and the sneer of his smile had got into his voice. "I have heard vulgar men call that knowledge cold feet."
He turned on his heel, with a contemptuous swing, climbed the low bank, and flung himself down in shade of the young poplars and tall raspberry bushes. But his dark bold eyes were not contemptuous; they were angry, as a man has a right to be angry when forced into contact with a better man than himself. Dick had been a drunkard of Life all his days. He had wronged men and fought with them; he had loved women, and wasted the wine of his heritage; and if he had found huge joy in the doing of these things he found little in the remembrance. But Tempest was the same fine, gallant soul of earlier years; still climbing his way upward, with eyes lit and hair blown back by the wind of the heights. He had governed himself in wisdom while Dick's temper had governed him as a fool; and the difference lay stark and wide between them now for all men to understand. But the little canker of cynical laughter which lived in Dick's heart came to his aid.
"For though it might frighten him to live with my memories it would certainly bore me to death to live with his," he said; and got up and went down the bank again in obedience to the long guttural cry of the breed. On the beach he found Tempest standing in the traces with Moonias a thicker bulk before him, and he halted, smiling.
"When a man shows he is stung there is generally reason for it," he said.
