Tempest had put Ducane sick with fear once already. And he expected to do it again. He gave place to Slicker with relief.
"Honey," Slicker slid an arm through Jennifer's. "You'll have to let me drive you home. Ducane will be late—business, you know. He won't be back to supper, and he sent you his love."
Slicker's imagination was responsible for this last. His boy-face was hard about the jaw, and, in the vernacular, he "put Tempest wise" with a flicker of his left eye-lid. Tempest unhitched the halter and stowed it under the seat in silence.
"That's good of you, Slicker, dear," said Jennifer tremulously. "But poor Harry does so hate the hotel meals. He says they're horrid."
"I feed there, and they haven't killed me yet," said Tempest cheerfully. But his face was grave again as Slicker swung the rig down by the river to the grey haze of the forest where the sweet-scented blanket of hill-fire smoke clung. Then he went back swiftly, with his scarlet tunic making a blot among the dark-shawled women squatted on the side-walks, and the clustered loafing men in their dingy store-clothes.
The knot round the bar-door gaped to let him in and closed again. Their broken vivid speech came to him full of the North. For to the men of "inside" the North-West is the world, and kingdoms and captains may fail and parliments run to red ruin unheeded so long as the rabbits which feed the lynx swarm in their thousands, and the running record between Fort Smith and anywhere else is won by a man whom other men do not hate over well.
Drifted scraps concerning a bear-trap that broke, a man who made no fur, little Marguerite who "vas si belle von taime," and Jack Audoine, the breed who portaged a loaded scow up the Rapids of the Damned; rivulets of talk in the Indian dialects, with the whole pock-marked by such familiar words as Mackenzie River, Fort Resolution, and Good Hope, were as familiar to Tempest as the smell of the river-wetted clothes and the moose-skin moccasins; of whiskey, and heated men, and the strong, light, coarse tobacco.
