When Bruce was left alone in the gloomy canyon, where the winter sun at its best did not shine more than three hours in the twenty-four, he had wondered whether the days or nights would be the hardest to endure. It was now well into December, and still he did not know. They were equally intolerable.
During the storms which kept him inside he spent the days looking at the floor, the nights staring at the ceiling, springing sometimes to his feet burning with feverish energy, a maddening desire to do something--and there was nothing for him to do but wait. Moments would come when he felt that he could go out and conquer the world bare-handed but they quickly passed with a fresh realization of his helplessness, and he settled back to the inevitable.
It was folly to go out penniless--unarmed; he had learned that lesson in the East and his condition then had been affluence compared to this. He was doing the one thing that it was possible for him to do in the circumstances--to get money enough to go outside.
"Slim" had brought a collection of traps down the river from Meadows, and Bruce had set these out. So far he had been rather lucky and the pile of skins in the corner was growing--lynx, cougar, marten, mink--but it still was not high enough.
If Bruce had been less sensitive, more world-hardened, his failure would not have seemed such a crushing, unbearable thing, but alone in the killing monotony he brooded over the money he had sunk for other people until it seemed like a colossal disgrace for which there was no excuse and that he could never live down. In his bitter condemnation of himself for his inexperience, his ill-judged magnanimity, he felt as though his was an isolated case--that no human being ever had made such mistakes before.
But it was thoughts of Helen that always gave his misery its crowning touch. She pitied him, no doubt, because, she was kind, but in her heart he felt she must despise him for a weakling--a braggart who could not make good his boasts. She needed him, too,--he was sure of it--and lack of money made him as helpless to aid her as though he were serving a jail sentence. When, in the night, his mind began running along this line he could no longer stay in his bunk; and not once, but many times, he got up and dressed and went outside, stumbling around in the brush, over the rocks--anything to change his thoughts.
He tried his utmost to put her out of his mind, yet as he plodded on his snow-shoes, along his fifteen-mile trap line, either actively or subconsciously his thoughts were of her. He could no longer imagine himself feeling anything more than a mild interest in any other woman. He loved her with the same concentration of affection that he had loved his mother.