The man still blew
into the stove, unaware of his company. Frona coughed, and he raised a
pair of smoke-reddened eyes to hers.
"Certainly," he said, casually enough. "Fasten the flaps and make
yourself comfortable." And thereat returned to his borean task.
"Hospitable, to say the least," she commented to herself, obeying his
command and coming up to the stove.
A heap of dwarfed spruce, gnarled and wet and cut to proper
stove-length, lay to one side. Frona knew it well, creeping and
crawling and twisting itself among the rocks of the shallow alluvial
deposit, unlike its arboreal prototype, rarely lifting its head more
than a foot from the earth. She looked into the oven, found it empty,
and filled it with the wet wood. The man arose to his feet, coughing
from the smoke which had been driven into his lungs, and nodding
approval.
When he had recovered his breath, "Sit down and dry your skirts. I'll
get supper."
He put a coffee-pot on the front lid of the stove, emptied the bucket
into it, and went out of the tent after more water. As his back
disappeared, Frona dived for her satchel, and when he returned a moment
later he found her with a dry skirt on and wringing the wet one out.
While he fished about in the grub-box for dishes and eating utensils,
she stretched a spare bit of rope between the tent-poles and hung the
skirt on it to dry.
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