re also.
The weather was still clear and cold. There was, of course, no absolute need of going hungry there, as far as we two were concerned, if we had had the courage, or rather the cowardice, to ask for bread.
But this man was a proud man and a complete man, I take it; and when a man of that nature gets cornered, he is going -to endure a great deal before he makes any sign. A true man can fight, he can kill, but he cannot ask for quarter. Want only makes such a man more sensitive. Distress only intensifies his proud and passionate nature, and he prepares himself for everything possible but an appeal to man. Besides, this man was not altogether a miner. He had never felt that he had won his place among the brawny, broad-shouldered men, who from the first, and all through life, had borne and accepted the common curse that fell on man through the first transgression, and he had always held himself some what aloof.
Perhaps he was fighting a battle with himself. Who knows? It seems to me now, although I had no thought of such a thing then, that he had made a resolve within himself to make his bread by the sweat of his brow, to set a good example to one whom fate had given into his charge, and never turn back or deviate from the one direction. To have asked for help from men of the old calling would have meant a great deal that he was not willing to admit, even if help had been forthcoming, which, as I have said, was extremely problematical.
