"Tom," said the girl, "can't you understand that it would be very much wiser if somebody told me exactly how Mr. Nasmyth got hurt?"
The axeman nodded. "Yes," he admitted, with a wink, "that's just how it strikes me, and I'm going to. The boss has no more arms and legs than he's a use for anyway."
Laura gazed at him in bewilderment, but the man's expression was perfectly grave. "Now," he added, "I guess one can talk straight sense to you, and the fact is I can't have you coming round here again. Just listen about two minutes, and I'll try to make the thing clear to you."
He did so with a certain graphic force that she had not expected from him, and the colour crept into her cheeks. Then, to Mattawa's astonishment, she smiled.
"Thank you," she said simply. "But the other man?"
"Well," replied Mattawa, "if he goes round talking, somebody will 'most pound the life out of him."
Then he swung round abruptly, for he was shrewd, and had his primitive notions of delicacy; and Laura went on through the stillness of the Bush, with a curious softness in her eyes. Mattawa had been terse, and, in some respects, his observations had not been tactful, but nobody could have impressed her more in Nasmyth's favour. Indeed, at the moment, she scarcely remembered how the aspersions Jake had made might affect herself. As it happened, she met Gordon near the settlement, and he stopped a moment. He had come upon her suddenly, and had looked at her with a suggestive steadiness, but she smiled.
"Yes," she said, "I have been to the dam. After the way in which you made it evident that you didn't want me to go there, it was, perhaps, no more than you could have expected."
"Ah!" rejoined Gordon, with a look of anxiety, "you probably got hold of Mattawa. Well, after all, I guess he has done the wise thing." Then after a pause he observed, "There is very little the matter with your courage."
"I fancy," observed Laura half wistfully, "that is, in several respects, fortunate."
Then she went on again, and though Gordon felt exceedingly compassionate, he frowned and closed one hand.
"It's a sure thing I'll have to tell Waynefleet what kind of a man he is," he said.
It was a nipping morning, and the clearing outside the ranch was flecked with patches of frozen snow, when Waynefleet sat shivering in a hide chair beside the stove. The broken viands upon the table in front of him suggested that he had just made a tolerable breakfast, but his pose was expressive of limp resignation, and one could have fancied from the look in his thin face that he was feeling very sorry for himself. Self-pity, in fact, was rather a habit of his, and, perhaps, because of it, he had usually very little pity to spare for anybody else. He looked up when, flushed and gasping, his daughter came in with two heavy pails of water. She shivered visibly.