The call of the wild . were never too weary to do. Theirirritability arose out of their misery, increasedwith it, doubled upon it, outdistanced wonderful patience of the trail whichcomes to men who toil hard and suffer sore,and remain sweet of speech and kindly, didnot come to these two men and the had no inkling of such a were stiff and in pain; their musclesached, their bones ached, their very heartsached ; and because of this they became sharpof speech, and hard words were first on theirlips in the morning and last at night. Charles and Hal wrangled whenever
The call of the wild . were never too weary to do. Theirirritability arose out of their misery, increasedwith it, doubled upon it, outdistanced wonderful patience of the trail whichcomes to men who toil hard and suffer sore,and remain sweet of speech and kindly, didnot come to these two men and the had no inkling of such a were stiff and in pain; their musclesached, their bones ached, their very heartsached ; and because of this they became sharpof speech, and hard words were first on theirlips in the morning and last at night. Charles and Hal wrangled whenever Mer-cedes gave them a chance. It was the cher- 142 THE CALL OF THE WILD ished belief of each that he did more than hisshare of the work, and neither forbore tospeak this beHef at every opportunity. Some-times Mercedes sided with her husband, some-times with her brother. The result was abeautiful and unending family quarrel. Start-ing from a dispute as to which should chopa few sticks for the fire (a dispute which con-. cerned only Charles and Hal), presentlywould be lugged in the rest of the family,fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, peoplethousands of miles away, and some of themdead. That Hals views on art, or the sortof society plays his mothers brother wrote,should have anything to do with the choppingof a few sticks of firewood, passes compre-hension ; nevertheless the quarrel was as likely THE TOIL OF TRACE AND TRAIL 143 to tend in that direction as in the directionof Charless political prejudices. And thatCharless sisters tale-bearing tongue shouldbe relevant to the building of a Yukon fire,was apparent only to Mercedes, who disbur-dened herself of copious opinions upon thattopic, and incidentally upon a few other traits
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