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There was no conversation, but I did not feel forgotten.
I turned my back on the cook and gazed into the fire, a miserable smouldering affair, and speculated on why I had never before noticed how much spare time there was in a minute. It may have been five of these spacious minutes, it may have been fifteen, that had passed away when the cook approached me. I could feel him coming. He came very close to me—and to the fire.
He put on some beans.
Then he went away, and there were many more minutes, many more.
Then something touched my arm. At last it had come (what we expect, if it be disagreeable, usually does come). I never moved a muscle. This time the pressure on my arm was unmistakable. I turned quickly and saw—the cook—with a gun!
The cook, gun, knives, fire, snow, and stars danced a mad jig before me for an instant. Then the cook suddenly resumed his proper position, and I saw that his disengaged hand was held in an attitude of warning for silence. He pointed off into the woods and appeared to be listening. Soon I thought I heard a snapping of a branch away off up the mountain.
“Bear,” the cook whispered. “Follow me.”
I followed. It was hard work to get over logs and stones without noise, in a long mackintosh, and, besides, I wished that I had brought a gun. I should have felt more comfortable about both man and beast. I struggled on for a while, when the thought suddenly struck home that if I went farther I should not be able to find my way back to camp. Everything is relative, and those empty tents and smouldering fire seemed a haven of security compared to the situation of being unarmed, and lost in the wilderness—with the cook.
I watched my chance and sneaked back to camp to get a gun. I was willing to believe the cook’s bear story, but I wanted a gun. When I got to camp there were many good reasons for not going back.
After a time I heard two shots close at hand, and soon the cook appeared. He said he could not find the bear’s track, and lost me, so thought he had better look me up and be on hand in case I had returned to camp, and the bear should come.
I thanked the cook for his solicitude.
To while away the time, I put up a target and commenced practising with a 30-30 rifle at fifty yards range.
I shot very badly.
The cook obligingly interested himself in my performance and kept tally on my aim, pointing out to me when it was high, when it was low, to the right or to the left.
Then he took his six shooter and put a half dozen bullets in the bull’s-eye offhand.
I lost my interest in shooting.
The cook gave me some lunch, and while I was eating he stood before the fire looking at it through the fingers of his. Outstretched hand, with a queer squint in his cold gray eyes, as though sighting along a rifle barrel, while a cigarette hung limply from his mouth.
Then in response to a winning smile (after all, a woman’s best weapon) he opened the floodgates of his thoughts and poured into my ears a succession of bloodcurdling adventures over which the big, big ‘I’ had dominated. “Yes,” he said musingly of his second murder, as he removed his squint from the fire to me, and a ghost of a smile played around his lips; “yes, it took six shots to keep him quiet, and you could have covered all the holes with a cap box—and his pard nearly got me.”