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