Still whistling, he passed the Chinese laundry shack on the creek, crossed the railroad tracks, and buried himself in the bush beyond. A quarter of an hour later he stole quietly into Stevens' camp and went to bed.
Stevens, dreaming of twenty horses plunging to death among the rocks in the river, slept uneasily. He awoke before it was dawn, but when he dragged himself from his tepee, moving quietly not to awaken his boy, he found John Aldous on his knees before a small fire, slicing thin rashers of bacon into a frying-pan. The weight of his loss was in the tired packer's eyes and face and the listless droop of his shoulders. John Aldous, with three hours between the blankets to his credit, was as cheery as the crackling fire itself. He had wanted to whistle for the last half-hour. Seeing Stevens, he began now.
"I wasn't going to rouse you until breakfast was ready," he interrupted himself to say. "I heard you groaning, Stevens. I know you had a bad night. And the kid, too. He couldn't sleep. But I made up my mind you'd have to get up early. I've got a lot of business on to-day, and we'll have to rouse Curly Roper out of bed to buy his pack outfit. Find the coffee, will you? I couldn't."
"See here, Aldous, you didn't mean what you said last night, did you? You didn't mean--that?"
"Confound it, yes! Can't you understand plain English, Stevens? Don't you believe a man when he's a gentleman? Buy that outfit! Why, I'd buy twenty outfits to-day, I'm--I'm feeling so fine, Stevens!"
For the first time in forty-eight hours Stevens smiled.
"I was wondering if I hadn't been dreaming," he said. "Once, a long time ago, I guess I felt just like you do now."
With which cryptic remark he went for the coffee.
Aldous looked up in time to see the boy stagger sleepily out of the tepee. There was something pathetic about the motherlessness of the picture, and he understood a little of what Stevens had meant.
An hour later, with breakfast over, they started for Curly's. Curly was pulling on his boots when they arrived, while his wife was frying the inevitable bacon in the kitchen.
"I hear you have some horses for sale, Curly," said Aldous.
"Twenty-nine, 'r twenty-eight--mebby twenty-seven."
Curly looked up from the task of pulling on his second boot.