But when she fully understood the transactions and realized that if she chose she could spend several hundred dollars, she grew very proud of that book.
About the empty cabins and the barns, working on the farms, wading the mud and water of the river bank, or tingling with cold on the ice went two Dannies.

The one a dull, listless man, mechanically forcing a tired, overworked body to action, and the other a self-accused murderer.
"I am responsible for the whole thing," he told himself many times a day.

"I always humored Jimmy.

I always took the muddy side of the road, and the big end of the log, and the hard part of the work, and filled his traps wi' rats from my own; why in God's name did I let the Deil o' stubbornness in me drive him to his death, noo?
Why didna I let him have the Black Bass?
Why didna I make him come home and put on dry clothes?
I killed him, juist as sure as if I'd taken an ax and broken his heid." Through every minute of the exposure of winter outdoors and the torment of it inside, Dannie tortured himself.

Of Mary he seldom thought at all.