You can't help feeling they're pretty good comrades when you see what they do in the traces." Thoreau had shouldered the second gunny sack and now led the way into the thicker spruce and balsam behind the cabin.

David and Father Roland followed, the latter explaining more fully why it was necessary to keep the sledge dogs "hard as rocks," and how the trick was done.

He was still talking, with the fingers of one hand closed about the little plush box in his pocket, when they came to the first of the fox pens.

He was watching David closely, a little anxiously--thrilled by the touch of that box.

He read men as he read books, seeing much that was not in print, and feeling by a wonderful intuitive power emotions not visible in a face, and he believed that in David there were strange and conflicting forces struggling now for mastery.