Finally the cold weather came. One morning, Francis crawled out of his buffalo robe and the world was a land of crisp whiteness. Frost covered everything. Mr. Grimes was already up, humming—of all things—while he sharpened his skinning and fleshing knife.

“To work, Mr. Tucket,” he announced. “Our holiday’s over.”

Now they had just two weeks to cut enough bait sticks—short pieces of green aspen—store them along the stream, plan the trap line, make skin-drying hoops of the same green aspen, and sort and “purify” the traps.

And with all this work to be done, company arrived. Francis, for a change, saw them first, but only because Mr. Grimes was out cutting bait sticks. Francis was in front of the hut, lashing some drying hoops together with thongs of fresh rawhide from a deer that had wandered into their camp. Across the meadow came four horses. Two of them were being led, and two of them were being ridden. They were quite far away, too far to identify the riders as anything but men, too far away to allow any wild guessing. But even so, Francis made a wild guess and decided they were Crows.

All of this took just five seconds. On the sixth second, he was in the house, looking out through an opening in its side. His cheek lay against the stock of his rifle, the hammer was back, a percussion cap covered the nipple, the barrel was charged, and his finger was on the trigger.

The two men rode, as though drawn by an invisible cord, straight toward the cabin.

——— Chapter Fifteen ———

WHEN THE MEN and horses were still some two hundred yards away, they stopped. One man dismounted and studied the soft ground of the meadow. He turned and said something to the man who was still mounted, and then swung back into his saddle. From the way he dismounted and mounted and the way they rode, Francis now realized that they weren’t Indians. More than likely, especially since they had pack horses, they were trappers.

He eased up from the rifle, but only a little. They could still be up to no good, and it didn’t hurt to be ready. He watched for some sign of their intentions—and got it when they were just a hundred yards from the house.

One of them slipped his rifle from its buckskin case and laid the gun across his lap. The other then did the same, and Francis could feel the hair on his neck rise. Nobody dropping in for a friendly visit would make a point of coming armed and ready.