"There isn't any choice to be made," growled Spurling; "you offer me your company or starvation. I choose your company, much as I detest it. And I'd like to know who you are to speak to me like this? And what there is to lose your temper about? If you'd explained what you'd wanted, I'd have come quietly; but I'd rather cut my throat at once and be done with it than be ordered about by a man like you--a fellow married to a squaw-wife."
Granger's face went white and his lips trembled; his finger closed upon the trigger, then with an effort he controlled himself. "I think I've heard enough from you on that point," he said; "suppose we drop this discussion and get the canoe ready?"
He turned upon his heel and walked into the hut, followed more slowly by Spurling.
This was by no means their first falling out in the past four months; from the night that they left Murder Point things had been going from bad to worse. Given two men who set out into the forest together, bound by the strongest ties of friendship, who travel in one another's footsteps and sleep side by side for days and nights at a stretch, without seeing any other face but one another's and their own reflected visage, with nothing to break the silence but their own voices, and the cries of the wilderness, which have become irritatingly monotonous because of their sameness and frequent reiteration, and it is a thing to be marvelled at if they do not come back enemies. But when they set out each with his own hidden secret, each with his own private suspicion of his companion, with a gnawing enmity between them which has been changed into a show of friendship only by force of circumstance, when the object of their journey is a possession over which they have quarrelled before and parted company, concerning which they are already secretly jealous, then the final relationship of those two men can be forecast without any fear of error.
Before they had reached the Forbidden River they had ceased to converse. By the time that they had landed at the hut, their nerves were jangled. Before they had been working there many days they had thought their way over all their old grievances, and, like petulant children, were on the lookout for any new cause of offence. The cause had come when Spurling, tired with rocking the cradle, his face and hands swollen by the sun and mosquito-bitten, had said, "I don't see why we should take all this trouble. I'm going to quit work."