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After a long time, as he grew stronger, Maggie had gone away, and David
had fried the bacon and heated the canned tomatoes or the beans. Before
she left she had written out a recipe for biscuits, and David would
study over it painstakingly, and then produce a panfull of burned and
blackened lumps, over which he would groan and agonize.
He himself had been totally incurious. He had lived a sort of animal
life of food and sleep, and later on of small tentative excursions
around the room on legs that shook when he walked. The snows came and
almost covered the cabin, and David had read a great deal, and talked at
intervals. David had tried to fill up the gap in his mind. That was how
he learned that David was his father's brother, and that his father had
recently died.
Going over it all now, it had certain elements that were not clear. They
had, for instance, never gone back to the ranch at all. With the first
clearing of the snow in the spring John Donaldson had appeared again,
leading two saddled horses and driving a pack animal, and they had
started off, leaving him standing in the clearing and gazing after them.
But they had not followed Donaldson's trail. They had started West, over
the mountains, and David did not know the country. Once they were lost
for three days.
He looked at the figure on the bed. Only ten years, and yet at that time
David had been vigorous, seemed almost young. He had aged in that ten
years. On the bed he was an old man, a tired old man at that. On that
long ride he had been tireless. He had taken the burden of the nightly
camps, and had hacked a trail with his hatchet across snow fields while
Dick, still weak but furiously protesting, had been compelled to stand
and watch.
Now, with the perspective of time behind him, and with the clearly
defined issue of David's protest against his return to the West, he went
again over the details of that winter and spring. Why had they not taken
Donaldson's trail? Or gone back to the ranch? Why, since Donaldson
could make it, had not other visitors come? Another doctor, the night
he almost died, and David sat under the lamp behind the close-screened
windows, and read the very pocket prayer-book that now lay on the stand
beside the bed? Why had they burned his clothes, and Donaldson brought
a new outfit? Why did Donaldson, for all his requests, never bring a
razor, so that when they struck the railroad, miles from anywhere, they
were both full bearded?