Chapter 13

It did not seem a serious break, at first, and I considered Pareso unusually clever when he coolly reduced the fracture and afterward made a cast of clay and kiln-baked it into brick. But the pain and the inflammation increased until we were compelled to lay up in camp. We remained there for seven weeks, all told. Pepin and his breed packers deserted us, in the meantime, not because of so much enforced idleness but more because both the Indian and the _métis_ is chronically averse to taking long journeys out of his…