There was a pause.  The curtain was suddenly drawn aside, and a charming little head and shoulders, furred to the throat and topped with a bewitching velvet cap, were thrust out.  In the obscurity little could be seen of the girl’s features, but there was a certain willfulness and impatience in her attitude.  Being in the shadow, she had the advantage of the others, particularly of Jack, as his figure was fully revealed in the moonlight against the snowbank.  Her eyes rested for a moment on his high boots, his heavy mustache, so long as to mingle with the unkempt locks which fell over his broad shoulders, on his huge red hands streaked with black grease from the wagon wheels, and some blood, stanched with snow, drawn from bruises in cutting out brambles in the brush; on—­more awful than all—­a monstrous, shiny “specimen” gold ring encircling one of his fingers,—­on the whiskey bottle that shamelessly bulged from his side pocket, and then—­slowly dropped her dissatisfied eyelids.

“Why can’t I stay here?” she said languidly.  “It’s quite nice and comfortable.”

“Because we can’t leave you alone, and we must go with this gentleman to help him.”

Miss Amy let the tail of her eye again creep shudderingly over this impossible Jack.  “I thought the—­the gentleman was going to help us,” she said dryly.

“Nonsense, Amy, you don’t understand,” said her father impatiently.  “This gentleman is kind enough to offer to make some sledge-runners for us at his cabin, and we must help him.”

“But I can stay here while you go.  I’m not afraid.”

“Yes, but you’re alone here, and something might happen.”

“Nothing could happen,” interrupted Jack, quickly and cheerfully.  He had flushed at first, but he was now considering that the carrying of a lady as expensively attired and apparently as delicate and particular as this one might be somewhat difficult.  “There’s nothin’ that would hurt ye here,” he continued, addressing the velvet cap and furred throat in the darkness, “and if there was it couldn’t get at ye, bein’, so to speak, in the same sort o’ fix as you.  So you’re all right,” he added positively.

Inconsistently enough, the young lady did not accept this as gratefully as might have been imagined, but Jack did not see the slight flash of her eye as, ignoring him, she replied markedly to her father, “I’d much rather stop here, papa.”

“And,” continued Jack, turning also to her father, “you can keep the wagon and the whole gorge in sight from the trail all the way up.  So you can see that everything’s all right.  Why, I saw you from the first.”  He stopped awkwardly, and added, “Come along; the sooner we’re off the quicker the job’s over.”

“Pray don’t delay the gentleman and—­the job,” said Miss Amy sweetly.

Reassured by Jack’s last suggestion, her father followed him with the driver and the second man of the party, a youngish and somewhat undistinctive individual, but to whose gallant anxieties Miss Amy responded effusively.  Nevertheless, the young lady had especially noted Jack’s confession that he had seen them when they first entered the gorge.  “And I suppose,” she added to herself mentally, “that he sat there with his boozing companions, laughing and jeering at our struggles.”