And yet no Bill appeared.

The brothers waited in the shack, and the darkness was increasing.  Any one of a number of things might have happened to their father, but they were not worried.  For one thing, they wasted no love on the stern old man.  They knew well enough that he had plenty of money, but he kept them here to a dog’s life in the shack, and they hated him for it.  Besides, they had a keen grievance which obscured any worry about Bill—­they were hungry, wildly hungry.  The darkness set in, and the feeble light wandered from the smoked chimney of the lantern and made the window black.

Outside, the wind began to scream, sighing in the distance among the firs, and then pouncing upon the cabin and shaking it as though in rage.  The fire would smoke in the stove at every one of these blasts, and the flame leaped in the lantern.

Bull Hunter had to lean closer to the light and frown to make out the print of his book.  The sight of his stolid immobility merely sharpened their hunger, for there was never any passion in this hulk of a man.  When he relaxed over a book the world went out like a snuffed candle for him.  He read slowly, lingering over every page, for now and again his eyes drifted away from the print, and he dreamed over what he had read.  In reality he was not reading for the plot, but for the pictures he found, and he dreaded coming to the end of a book also, for books were rare in his life.  A scrap of a magazine was a treasure.  A full volume was a nameless delight.

And so he worked slowly through every paragraph and made it his and dreamed over it until he knew every thought and every picture by heart.  Once slowly devoured in this way, it was useless to reread a book.  It was far better to simply sit and let the slow memory of it trail through his mind link by link, just as he had first read it and with all the embroiderings which his own fancy had conjured up.

Often this stupid pondering over a book would madden the two brothers.  It irritated them till they would move the lantern away from him.  But he always followed the light with a sigh and uncomplainingly settled down again.  Sometimes they even snatched the book out of his hands.  In that case he sat looking down at his empty fingers, dreaming over his own thoughts as contentedly as though the living page were in his vision.  There was small satisfaction in tormenting him in these ways.

Tonight they dared not bother him.  The stained hands were still in their minds, and the tremendous, joyous laughter as he whirled the stump over his head still rang in their ears.  But they watched him with a sullen envy of his immobility.  Just as a man without an overcoat envies the woolly coat of a dog on a windy December day.

Only one sound roused the reader.  It was a sudden loud snorting from the shed behind the house and a dull trampling that came to him through the noise of the rising wind.  It brought Bull lurching to his feet, and the stove jingled as his weight struck the yielding center boards of the floor.  Out into the blackness he strode.  The wind shut around him at once and plastered his clothes against his body as if he had been drenched to the skin in water.  Then he closed the door.