He warmed over a pan of biscuits and cold bacon and threw a handful of coffee in the dismal looking coffee pot. When it was ready he placed it on the clammy oilcloth and sat down. He eyed the food for a moment--the ever-present bacon, the sticky can of condensed milk, the black coffee in the tin cup, the biscuits covered with protuberances that made them look like a panful of horned toads. He realized suddenly that, hungry as he had thought himself, he could not eat.
With a sweeping, vehement gesture he pushed it all from him. The tin cup upset and a small waterfall of coffee splashed upon the floor, the can of condensed milk rolled across the table and fell off but he did not pick it up. Instead, he folded his arms upon the oilcloth in the space he had made and dropping his forehead upon his ragged shirt-sleeve, he cried. Bruce had hit bottom.
Older, wiser, braver men than Bruce have cried in some crisis of their lives. Tears are no sign of weakness. And they did not come now because he was quitting--because he did not mean to struggle on somehow or because there was anything or anybody of whom he was afraid. It was only that he was lonely, heartsick, humiliated, weary of thinking, bruised with defeat.
These tears were different from the ready tears of childhood, different from the last he had shed upon his dead mother's unresponsive shoulder; these came slowly--smarting, stinging as they rose. His shoulders moved but he made no sound.
* * * * * A little way from the cabin where the steep trail from Ore City dropped off the mountain to the sudden flatness of the river bar, some dead branches cracked and a horse fell over a fallen log, upsetting the toboggan that it dragged and taking Uncle Bill with it. Helen hurried to the place where he was trying to extricate himself from the tangle.
"Are you dead, Uncle Bill?"
"Can't say--I never died before. Say," in a querulous whisper as he helped the floundering horse up--"Why don't you notice where you're goin'? Here you come down the mountain like you had fur on your feet, and the minute I gits you where I wants you to be quiet you make more noise nor a cow-elk goin' through the brush. How you feelin', ma'am?" to Helen. "I expect you're about beat."
"Sorry to disappoint you, Uncle Bill, but I'm not. You tried so hard to keep me from coming I don't think I'd tell you if I was."
"You wouldn't have to--I reckon I'd find it out before we'd gone far. I've noticed that when a lady is tired or hungry she gits powerful cross."