A beam of light shone through the generous
latchstring hole in the door. Stealing softly over, she peeped through
this hole. From end to end of the big room and back again Roaring Bill
paced slowly, looking straight ahead of him with a fixed, absent stare,
his teeth closed on his nether lip. Hazel blinked wonderingly. Many
an hour in the last three months she had walked the floor like that,
biting her lip in mental agony. And then, while she was looking, Bill
abruptly extinguished the candles. In the red gleam from the hearth
she saw him go into the kitchen, closing the door softly. After that
there was no sound but the swirl of the storm brushing at her window.
CHAPTER XI
WINTER--AND A TRUCE
In line with Roaring Bill's forecast, the weather cleared for a brief
span, and then winter shut down in earnest. Successive falls of snow
overlaid the earth with a three-foot covering, loose and feathery in
the depths of the forest, piled in hard, undulating windrows in the
scattered openings. Daily the cold increased, till a half-inch layer
of frost stood on the cabin panes. The cold, intense, unremitting,
lorded it over a vast realm of wood and stream; lakes and rivers were
locked fast under ice, and through the clear, still nights the aurora
flaunted its shimmering banners across the northern sky.
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