But there was so little food left and the time was yet so long until fall would bring relief from the famine that he could only answer each of them with a grim and final “No.”

And watch the last hope flicker and die in their eyes and watch them turn away, to go and sit for the last hours beside their children.

Bemmon became increasingly irritable and complaining as the rationing and heat made existence a misery; insisting that Lake and the others were to blame for the food shortage, that their hunting efforts had been bungling and fainthearted. And he implied, without actually saying so, that Lake and the others had forbidden him to go near the food chamber because they did not want a competent, honest man to check up on what they were doing.

There were six hundred and three of them the blazing afternoon when the girl, Julia, could stand his constant, vindictive, faultfinding no longer. Lake heard about it shortly afterward, the way she had turned on Bemmon in a flare of temper she could control no longer and said:

“Whenever your mouth is still you can hear the children who are dying today⁠—but you don’t care. All you can think of is yourself. You claim Lake and the others were cowards⁠—but you didn’t dare hunt with them. You keep insinuating that they’re cheating us and eating more than we are⁠—but your belly is the only one that has any fat left on it⁠—”

She never completed the sentence. Bemmon’s face turned livid in sudden, wild fury and he struck her, knocking her against the rock wall so hard that she slumped unconscious to the ground.

“She’s a liar!” he panted, glaring at the others. “She’s a rotten liar and anybody who repeats what she said will get what she got!”

When Lake learned of what had happened he did not send for Bemmon at once. He wondered why Bemmon’s reaction had been so quick and violent and there seemed to be only one answer:

Bemmon’s belly was still a little fat. There could be but one way he could have kept it so.