Bruce wondered if Slim had answered. He would wager his buckskin bag of dust that he had not. The marvel was that he had even kept the letter. He looked again at the date line--twelve years--the mortgages had long since been foreclosed, if it had depended upon Slim to pay them--and she was twenty-five. He wondered if she'd "married well."
Slim was a failure; he stood for nothing in the world of achievement; for all the difference that his going made, he might never have been born. Then a thought as startling as the tangible appearance of some ironic, grinning imp flashed to his mind. Who was he, Bruce Burt, to criticise his partner, Slim? What more had he accomplished? How much more difference would his own death make in anybody's life? His mother's labored words came back with painful distinctness: "I've had such hopes for you, my little boy. I've dreamed such dreams for you--I wanted to see them all come true." An inarticulate sound came from him that was both pain and self-disgust. He was close to twenty-eight--almost thirty--and he'd spent the precious years "just bumming round." Nothing to show for them but a little gold dust and the clothes he wore. He wondered if his mother knew.
Her wedding ring was still in a faded velvet case that he kept among his treasures. He never had seen a woman who had suggested ever so faintly the thought that he should like to place it on her finger. There had been women, of a kind--"Peroxide Louise," in Meadows, with her bovine coquetry and loud-mouthed vivacity, yapping scandal up and down the town, the transplanted product of a city's slums, not even loyal to the man who had tried to raise her to his level.
Bruce never had considered marrying; the thought of it for himself always made him smile. But why couldn't he--the thought now came gradually, and grew--why shouldn't he assume the responsibilities Slim shirked if conditions were the same and help was still needed? In expiation, perhaps, he could halfway make amends.
He'd write and mail the letter in Ore City as soon as he could snowshoe out. He'd express them half the dust and tell them that 'twas Slim's. He'd----"OO--oo--ough!" he shivered--he'd forgotten to stoke the fire. Oh, well, a soogan would do him well enough.
He pulled a quilt from under Slim and wrapped it about his own shoulders. Then he sat down again by the fireless stove and laid his head on his folded arms upon the rough pine table. The still body on the bunk grew stark while he slept, the swift-running river froze from shore to shore, the snow piled in drifts, obliterating trails and blocking passes, weighting the pines to the breaking point, while the intense cold struck the chill of death into the balls of feathers huddled for shelter under the flat branches of the spruces.