Myers grunted, beating the swarming flies from hands and face.
"Guess me an' Heriot is a-goin' ter hev good strong beards ter shelter us in a while," he remarked. "Wot you an' th' Inspector want wi' keepin' yer faces bare ter be bit I can't see. Tommy-rot, I calls it."
"C'est en règle," said Depache, and shrugged his shoulders.
He could not have explained why he and Tempest found no day too hard nor too long but that they could take from it five minutes for a cold-water shave and three more to brush their hair. But Tempest knew. There is something in man which makes it unwise for him to let go of the outer usages of refinement to which he has been accustomed. Insensibly those refinements keep awake the like in the heart, though outward conditions may batter on both. At no time is it more necessary for some men to hold on to their inner self-respect by according outward respect to their body than in the desolate places where there is none to shame them if they fall. Tempest brushed his clothes daily. He washed out the coarse flannel shirt of the day's wear each night; and through all the dust and the sweating heat and the loathsome crawling flies he walked with the cleanly-groomed alertness which he carried in the barrack-yard. He dared not let go of that, for he had lost too much else; and Depache, blindly copying the man to whom he gave a silent, unobtrusive worship, bore his head the higher for it also.
Dick and Myers frankly sloughed conventionalities on every possible point. They were strong as brown bears and restless as foxes. While Tempest wrote up his diary or did his washing, and Depache, roaming the wind-swept shore, sang his pathetic lumber-camp songs in clipped French, Dick and Myers caught the long, coarse trout of the Great Slave, or the abundant whitefish, or hunted game along the shores, and found none. Dick had his own physical pain on those burning days of the portage-trail. His walk had not the spring of Tempest's, and the sand and the stone of the way seared his feet through the moccasin-soles until every step meant the negotiation of a separate hill of torment.
