Bill made plans for an early start to his Twenty-three Mile cabin. The hike would have been easy enough, considering the firm snow that covered the underbrush, but the hours of daylight were few and swift. And he had no desire to try to find his way in that trackless country in the darkness.
"I'll leave before dawn—as soon as it gets gray," he told Virginia as he bade her good night. "I'll come back the next day, with a backload of supplies. And with the little we have left, we will have enough to go on. We can start for Bradleyburg the day after that."
Virginia took no pleasure in bidding him good-by. She had already learned that this winter forest was a bleak and fearful place when her woodsman was away. Curiously, she could find little consolation in the thought that she and Harold could have a full day together, alone. And before the night was half over, it seemed to her, she heard his stealing feet on the cabin floor outside her curtain.
He seemed to be moving quietly, almost stealthily. She heard the stove door open, and the subdued crack of a match scratched gently. A warm glow flooded her being when she understood.
For all the arduous day's toil that waited him, Bill hadn't forgotten to build her fire. The cabin would still be warm for her to dress. She didn't know that her eyes were shining in the gloom. She drew aside the curtain.
"I'm awake, Bill. I want to tell you good-by again," she said.
"I don't see what makes me so clumsy," Bill returned impatiently. "I thought I could get this fire going without waking you up. But I'm glad enough to have another good-by."
"And you'll be—awfully careful?" Her voice did not hold quite steadily. "So many—many things can happen in those awful woods—when you are alone. I never realized before how they're always waiting, always holding a sword over your head, ready to cut you down. I'm afraid to have you go——"
He laughed gently, but the deathless delight he felt at her words rippled through the laugh like flowing water. "There's nothing to be afraid of, Virginia. You'll see me back to-morrow night. I've wandered these woods by myself a thousand times——"
"And the thousandth and first time you might fall into their trap! But why can't we take some of that grizzly meat——"
"Virginia, you'd break your pretty teeth on it. Of course we could in a pinch—but this is no march, to-day. Good-by."
"Good-by." Her voice sank almost to a whisper, and her tones were sober and earnest. "I'll pray for you, Bill—the kind of prayers you told me about—entreating prayer to a God that can hear—and understand—and help. A real God, not just an Idea such as I used to believe in. Here's my hand, Bill."
He groped for it as a plant gropes for sunlight, as the blind grope to find their way. He found it at last: it was swallowed in his own palm, and the heart of the man raced and thrilled and burned. She couldn't see what he did with it in the darkness. It seemed to her she felt a warmth, a throbbing, a pressure that was someway significant and portentous above any experience of her life. Yet she didn't know that he had dropped to his knees outside the curtain and pressed the hand to his lips. The door closed slowly behind him.
The last stars were fading, slipping away like ghosts into the further recesses of the sky, as he pushed away from the cabin door. He didn't need the full light of morning to find his way the first few miles. He need only head toward the peak of a familiar mountain, now a shadow against the paling sky.
The night was not so cold as it had a right to be. He had expected a temperature far below zero: in reality it seemed not far below freezing. Some weather change impended, and at first he felt vaguely uneasy. But he mushed on, the long miles gliding slowly, steadily beneath him. Only once he missed his course, but by back-tracking one hundred yards he found it again.
Morning came out, the trees emerged from the gloom, the shadows faded. He kept his direction by the landmarks learned while following his trap lines. The day was surprisingly warm. His heavy woolens began to oppress him.
As always the wilderness was silent and vaguely sinister, but after a few hours it suddenly occurred to him that the air was preternaturally still. A few minutes later, when he struck a match to light his pipe, this impression was vividly confirmed. As is the habit with all woodsmen he watched the match-smoke to detect the direction of the wind. The blue strands, with hardly a waver or tremor, streamed straight up. He was somewhat reassured, however, when he remembered that he had not yet emerged from a great valley between low ranges that ordinarily prevented free passage of the winds.
He mushed on, his snowshoes crunching on the white crust. The powers of the wilderness gave him good speed—almost to the noon hour. Then they began to show him what they could do.
He was suddenly aware that the fine edge of the wilderness silence had been dulled. There was a faint stir at his ear drums, to dim to name or identify or even to accept as a reality. He stopped, listening intently.
The stir grew to a faint and distant murmur, the murmur to a long swish like a million rustling garments. A tree fell, with a crash, far away. Then the wind smote him.
In itself it was nothing to fear. It was not a hurricane, not even a particularly violent storm, but only a brisk gale that struck him from the side and more or less impeded his progress. Trees that were tottering and ready to fall went down with reverberating reports; the snowdust whirled through the forest, changing the contour of the drifts, and filling up the tracks of the wild creatures. But for Bill the wind held a real menace. It was from the southeast, and warm as a girl's hand against his face.
No man of the Northwest Provinces is unacquainted with this wind. It is prayed for in the spring because its breath melts the drifts swiftly, but it is hated to death by the traveler caught far from his cabin on snowshoes. The wind was the far-famed Chinook, the southeast gale that softens the snow as a child's breath melts the frost on a window pane.
It did not occur to Bill to turn back. Already he was nearly halfway to his destination. The food supplies had to be secured, sooner or later; and when the Chinook comes no man knows when it will go away. He mushed on through the softening snow.
Within an hour the crust was noticeably softer. One hour thereafter and the snow was soft and yielding as when it had first fallen in early winter. Mushing was no longer a pleasant pursuit. Henceforth it was simply toil, rigorous and exhausting. The snowshoe sank deep, the snow itself clung to the webs and frame until it was almost impossible to lift.
A musher in the soft wet snow can only go at a certain pace. There is no way to hurry the operation and get speedily over the difficulties. Any attempt to quicken the pace results only in a fall. The shoe cannot be pushed ahead as when the snow is well-packed or crusted. It has to be deliberately lifted, putting the leg tendons to an unnatural strain.
It was too far to turn back. As many miles of weary snow stretched behind him as before him. At Twenty-three Mile cabin he could pass a night as comfortable as at home: there were food and blankets in plenty, and the well-built hut contained a stove. Once there, he could wait for a hard freeze that would be certain to harden the half-thawed snow and make it fit for travel. His only course was to push on step by step.
The truth suddenly dawned upon him that he was face to face with one of the most uncomfortable situations of all his years in the forest. He didn't believe he would be able to make the cabin before the fall of night; if indeed he were able to complete the weary miles, it would only be by dint of the most cruel and exhausting labor. He carried no blankets, and although with the aid of his camp ax he could keep some sort of a fire, a night out in the snow and the cold was not an experience to think of lightly.
Bill knew very well just what capabilities for effort the human body holds. It has certain definite limits. After a few hours of such labor as this the body is tired,—tired clear through and aching in its muscles. Despondency takes the place of hope, the step is somewhat faltering, hunger assails and is forgotten, even the solace of tobacco is denied because the hand is too tired to grope for and fill the pipe. Thereafter comes a deeper stage of fatigue, one in which every separate step requires a distinct and tragic effort of will. The perceptions are blunted, the uncertainty of footfall is more pronounced, the stark reality of the winter woods partakes of a dreamlike quality. Then comes utter and complete exhaustion.
In its first stages there can still be a few dragging or staggering steps, a last effort of a brave and commanding will. Perhaps there is even a distance of creeping. But then the march is done! There is no comeback, no rallying. The absolute limit has been reached. But fortunately, lying still in the snow, the wanderer no longer cares. He wonders why he did not yield to this tranquil comfort long since.
Bill began to realize that he was approaching his own limit. The weary miles crept by, but with a tragic languor that was like a nightmare. But time flew; only a little space of daylight remained.
Bill's leg muscles were aching and burning now, and he had to force himself on by sheer power of his will. He would count twenty-five painful steps, then halt. The wind had taken a more westerly course by now, and the snow was no longer melting. The air was more crisp: probably one night would serve to recrust the snow. But the fact became ever more evident that the darkness would overtake him before he could reach the cabin.
But now, curiously, he dreaded the thought of pausing and making a fire. Partly he feared—with the age-old fear that lay buried deep in every cell—the long, bitter night without shelter, food or blankets; but even the labor of fire-building appalled his spirit. I would be a mighty task, fatigued as he was: first to clear away the snow, cut down trees, hew them into lengths and split them—all with a light camp ax that only dealt a sparrow blow—then to kneel and stoop and nurse the fire.
His woodsman's senses predicted a bitter night, in spite of the warmth of the day. It would harden the snow again, but it would also wage war against his life. All night long he would have to fight off sleep so that he could mend the fire and cut fuel. It mustn't be a feeble, flickering fire. The cold could get in then. All night long the flame must not be allowed to flag. In his fatigue it would be so easy to dose off,—just for a moment, and the fire would burn out. In that case the fire of his spirit would burn out too,—just as certain, just as soon.
Late afternoon: already the shadows lay strange and heavy in the distant tree aisles. And all at once he paused, thrilled, in his tracks.
A little way to the east, on the bank of a small creek, his father and his traitorous partner had once had a mining claim,—a mine they had tried unsuccessfully to operate before Bronson had made his big strike. They had built a small cabin, and for nearly thirty years it had stood moldering and forgotten. Twice in his life Bill had seen it,—once as a boy, when his father had taken him there on some joyous, holiday excursion, and once in his travels Bill had beheld it at a distance. Its stove had rotted away years since; it contained neither food nor blankets nor furniture, yet it was a shelter against the night and the cold. And even now it was within half a mile of where he stood.
Exultant and thankful, Bill turned in his tracks and mushed over toward it.
There was plenty of heart-breaking work to do when Bill finally reached the little cabin. The snow had banked up to the depth of several feet around it and had blown and packed against the door. He took off one of his snowshoes to use as a shovel and stolidly began the work of removing the barricade. There was no opening the door against the pressure of the snow. Besides, the bolt was solidly rusted.
But after a few weary strokes it occurred to him that the easiest way would be to cut some sort of an opening in the top of the door, just large enough for his body to crawl through. As the cabin was abandoned there would be no possible disadvantage to such an opening: and since the fire had to be built outside the cabin, against the backlogs, the door would have to be left open anyway, to admit the heat. With a few strokes of his sharp little camp ax he cut away the planks, leaving a black hole in the door. He lighted a match and peered in.
The interior was unchanged since his previous visit, years before. The cabin had no floor, not the least vestige of furniture, and rodents had littered the ground with leaves.
He turned to his toil of making a fire. First he cut down a spruce—a heart-breaking task with his little ax—then laboriously hacked it into lengths. These he bore to the cabin, staggering with the load. He split the logs, cutting some of them into firewood for kindling. Then he made a pile of shavings.
He tested the wind and found it blowing straight west and away from the cabin. He felt oddly tired and dull, much too tired to strain and listen for some whispered message of an inner voice that seemed to be trying hard to get his attention, a few little, vague misgivings that haunted him. His comfort depended, he told himself, on the heat of the fire beating in through the little opening of the cabin door, so he placed the backlog just as close as he dared in front. Then he laid down split pieces for frame of his fire and erected his heap of kindling.
He entered through the opening and stood on the ground below to light the fire. He didn't desire to crawl through the flames to enter the cabin. Reaching as far as he could, he was just able to insert the candle. The wind caught it, the kindling flames. Then he stood shivering, waiting for the room to warm.
He had a sweeping flood of thoughts as he watched the leaping flame. Its cheerful crackle, its bright color in the gloom was almost too good to be true. In these dark forests he had learned to be wary and on guard at too great fortune. Quite often it was only a prank of perverse forest gods, before they smote him with some black disaster. It seemed to him that there was a wild laughter, a Satanic mocking in the joyous crackle that was vaguely but fearfully ominous. The promise in the rainbow, the siren's song to the mariners, the little dancing light in the marsh—promising warmth and safety but only luring the weary traveler to this death—had this same quality: the cheer, the hope, the beauty only to be blasted by misfortune.
The warmth flooded in, and he looked about for something to sit on. He wished he had brought in one of the spruce logs he had cut. But it was too late to procure one now. The flames leaped at the opening of the cabin: he would be obliged to crawl laboriously through them to get into the open. Tired out, he lay down in the dry dirt, putting his arm under his head. He would soon go to sleep.
But his ragged, exhausted nerves would not find rest in sleep at once. His thoughts were troubling and unpleasant. The pale firelight filled the cabin, dancing against the walls. The glare reflected wanly on the ground where he lay.
All at once he was aware that his eyes were fastened upon an old cigar box on a shelf against the wall. He seemed to have a remembered interest in it,—as if long ago he had examined its contents with boyish speculations. But he couldn't remember what it contained. Likely enough it was empty.
The hours were long, and the wind wailed and crept like a housebreaker about the cabin; and at last—rather more to pass the time than for any other reason—he climbed to his feet and stepped to the shelf on which the box lay.
As he reached to seize it, he had a distinct premonition of misfortune. It was as if some subtle consciousness within him, knowing and remembering every detail of his past and its infinite and exact relations with his present, was warning him that to open the box was to receive knowledge that would be hateful to him. Yet he would not be cowed by such a visionary danger. He was tired out, his nerves were torn, and he was prey to his own dark imaginings. Likely enough the box was empty.
It was not, however. It contained a single photograph.
His eye leaped over it. He remembered now; he had looked at it during his former visit to the cabin, years before. It was a typical old-fashioned photograph—two men standing in stiff and awkward poses in an old-fashioned picture gallery—printed in the time-worn way. No modern photographer, however, could have caught a better likeness or made a more distinct picture. It had obviously been one of his father's possessions and had been left in the cabin.
One of the men was his own father. He had seen his photograph often enough to recognize it; besides, he remembered the man in the flesh. And he stared at the other face—a rather handsome, thin-lipped, sardonic-eyed face—as if he were looking at a ghost.
"Great God," he cried. "It's Harold Lounsbury!"
But instantly he knew it could not be Harold Lounsbury. The picture was fully twenty-five years old and the face was that of a mature man, probably aged thirty. Harold Lounsbury himself was only thirty. And now, looking closer, he saw that the features were not quite the same. There was more breeding, more sensitiveness in Harold's face. And there was also, dim and haunting, some slight resemblance to Kenly Lounsbury, whom he had brought up into Clearwater and who had gone back with Vosper.
Yet already his inner consciousness was screaming in his ear the identity of this man. Already he knew. It was no other than Rutheford, the man who later, in the cavern darkness, had struck his father down.
His deductions followed with deadly and remorseless certainty. He knew now why Harold Lounsbury had come into Clearwater. Virginia had told Bill that her lover seemed to have some definite place in view for his prospecting: he had simply come to search for the same lost mine that Bill had discovered the previous day. He knew now why Kenly Lounsbury had been willing to finance Virginia's trip into the North,—not in hopes of finding his lost nephew, but to find the mine of which he also had some knowledge and thus repair the broken remnants of his fortune. In the same sweep of realization he knew why Harold Lounsbury's face had always haunted him and filled him with hazy, uncertain memories. He had never seen Harold before; but he had seen this photograph in his own boyhood, and Harold's face had so resembled the one in the picture that it had haunted and disturbed him.
Only too well he knew the truth. Harold Lounsbury was Rutheford's son,—the son of his father's murderer. Kenly Lounsbury was Rutheford's brother. Both had come to Clearwater to repair their broken fortunes from the mine of which they both had knowledge. Whether it was guilty knowledge or not no man could tell.
Such directions as Rutheford had given his son had been unavailing because of the snowslide that had changed the contour of the little valley where the mine lay. He understood now Harold's disappointment and emotion when Bill had discovered the mine. Likely his own name was Harold Rutheford, or else Rutheford's true name had been Lounsbury. Bill stood shivering all over with rage and hate.
Now he knew the road of vengeance! He had only to trace Harold Lounsbury back to his city—there to find his father's murderer. His eyes were glittering and terrible to see at the potentialities of that finding. Yet in an instant he knew that death had likely already claimed the elder Rutheford. Otherwise he himself would have come back, long since, to recover the mine. He would be financing the expedition, rather than his brother Kenly.
But by that stern old law, the law that goes down to the roots of the earth and whose justice lies in mystic balances beyond the sight of men, has it not been written that the sins of the father shall be visited upon the son? It wasn't too late yet to command some measure of payment. In Virginia's own city lived the Lounsburys,—a proud and wealthy family, moving in the most haughty circles, patronizing the humble, flattered and honored and exalted. But oh, he could break them down! He could stamp their name with shame. He could not pay eye for eye and tooth for tooth, because Rutheford was likely already dead. He could not pay for his father's murder by striking down his murderer. But he could make Harold pay for his own wrongs. He could make him atone for the bitter moments of his youth and manhood, that irremediable loss of his boyhood. If Rutheford had left a widow he could make her pay for his own mother's sufferings.
As he stood in that bleak and lonely cabin, lost in the desolate wastes of snow, he was simply the clansman—the feudist—the primitive avenger. Virginia too should know the crime, and the haunting sight of those pitiful bones in the dark cavern would rise before her eyes whenever she sought Harold's arms. He would show her the picture; she could see the murderer's face in her own lover's. She could never yield to him then——
Virginia! Soft above the wail and complaint of the wind, he spoke her name. His star, his universe, the gracious, beautiful girl whose happiness had been his one aim! And could he change that aim now?
The wind wept, the snow was swept before it in great, unearthly clouds of white, the fire crackled and leaped at the opening in the cabin door. The northern winter night closed down, ever deeper, ever darker, ever more fraught with those mighty passions of the human soul. But he responded no more to the wild music of the wind. The wilderness passions no longer found an echo in his own heart. He had suddenly remembered Virginia.
His face was like clay in the dancing light. His eyes were sunken and were dark as night. He knew now where his course would lie. All at once he knew by a knowledge true as life that this dark cabin, in the dark forest, must keep its secrets.
He could not wreak vengeance upon the man Virginia loved. He could not take payment from her. The same law that had governed him before was still the immutable voice of his being, the basic and irrevocable law of his life. He could not blast her happiness with such a revelation as this. His boyhood dream of vengeance would go the way of all his other dreams,—like the smoke of a camp fire lost in the unmeasured spaces of the forest. The shadow that the dark woods had cast upon his spirit seemed to grow and deepen.
But he must act now, while his strength was upon him. To look again into Harold's face might cost him his own resolve. To think of Virginia in his arms, her lips against his, the wicked blood of the man pulsing so close that she could thrill at it and hear it, might set him on fire again. He must destroy the evidence. The night might bring his own death—he had a vague presentiment of disaster—and this photograph must never be found beside his body. She knew his father's story; her quick mind would leap to the truth at once. Besides, the destruction of the photograph—so that he could never look at it again—might lessen his own bitterness and give him a little peace. He crumpled it in his hand, and turning, gave it to the flames at the cabin mouth.
And from the savage powers of Nature there came a strange and incredible response. The wind shrieked, then seemed to ship about in the sky, completely changing direction. And all at once the smoke from the fire began to pour in upon him, choking his lungs and filling his eyes with tears.
For a full moment Bill gave little attention to the deepening clouds of pungent, biting wood smoke that the wind whipped in through the hole he had cut in the door. Likely it was just a momentary gust, a shifting in the air currents, and the wind would soon resume its normal direction. Besides, the discovery that he had just made seemed to hold and occupy all the territory of his thought: he was scarcely aware of the burning pain that the acrid, resinous green-wood smoke brought to his eyes. This was the most bitter moment of his life, and he was lost and remote in his dark broodings. The smoke didn't matter.
He began really to wonder about it when the room grew so smoky that it no longer received the firelight. The hole in the door was like a flue: the smoke—that deadly green-wood smoke known of old to the woodsman—streamed through in great clouds. He had shut his eyes at first; now he found it impossible to keep them open. The pungent smoke crept into his lungs and throat, burning like fire. He knew that it could no longer be disregarded.
It had been part of his wilderness training to respond like lightning in a crisis. Many times on the forest trails life itself had depended upon an instantaneous decision, then immediate effort to carry the decision out. The fawn that does not leap like a serpent's head at the first crack of a twig as the wolf steals toward him in the thicket never lives to grow antlers. The power to act, to summon and focus the full might of the muscles in the wink of an eye, then to hurl them into a breach had been Bill's salvation many times. But to-night the power seemed gone. For long seconds his muscles hung inert. He didn't know what to do.
The capacity for mighty and instantaneous effort seemed gone from his body. His mind was slow too,—blunted. He could make no decisions. He only seemed bewildered and impotent.
The truth was that Bill had been near the point of utter exhaustion from his day's toil in the snow and his labor of building the fire. The vital nervous fluids no longer sprang forth to his muscles at the command of his brain: they came tardily, if at all. The fountain of his nervous energy had simply run down as the battery runs down in a motor, and it could only be recharged by a rest. But there was a deeper reason behind this strange apathy. The last blow—the sight of the photograph of his father's murderer and its new connection with his life—had for the time being at least crushed the fighting spirit within the man. The fight for life no longer seemed worth while. In his bitterness he had lost the power to care.
The smoke deepened in the cabin. It seemed to be affecting his power to stand erect. He tried to think of some way to save himself; his mind was slow and dull.
He knew that he couldn't get out of the cabin. There was only a little hole in the door; to crawl through it, inch by inch as he had entered, would subject him to the full fury of the flames. Oh, they would sear and destroy him quickly if he tried to creep through them! All night they had been mocking him with their cheerful crackle; they had only been waiting for this chance to torture him. He had to spring high to enter the little hole at all; there was no way to dodge the flames outside. But he might knock the logs apart and put the fire out.
There was only a distance of two paces between him and the door, but he seemed to have difficulty in making these. He reeled against the wall. But when he tried to thrust his arms through to reach the burning logs, the cruel tongues stabbed at his hands.
But in spite of the pain, he reached again. The skin blistered on his hands, and for a long, horrible instant he groped impotently. The flame was raging by now, two or three pitch-laden spruce chunks blazing fiercely at once, and it seemed wholly likely that the cabin itself would catch fire. But he couldn't reach the logs.
He remembered his gloves then and fumbled for them in his pocket. The smoke could only be endured a few seconds more. He caught hold the edge of the opening and tried to spring up. But the flames beat into his face and drove him down again.
For a moment he stood reeling, trying to think, trying to remember some resource, some avenue of escape. There was no furniture to stand on. If he could cover his face he might be able to leap part way through the opening and knock the burning logs apart. He tried to open his smarting eyes, but the lids were wracked with pain and would not at once respond. He made it at last, but the dense smoke was impervious to his vision. The firelight gave it a ghastly pallor.
His ax! With his ax he could chop the door away. His hand fumbled at his belt. But he remembered now; he lad left his ax outside the cabin, its blade thrust into the spruce log that had supplied his fuel.
Suddenly he saw himself face to face with seemingly certain death. It was curious that he did not feel more fear, greater revulsion. It was almost as if it didn't matter. While the steady sinking of the burning logs lessened, in some degree, the danger of the cabin igniting—a few inches of snow against the door remaining unmelted—the smoke clouds were swiftly and surely strangling him. Already his consciousness was departing. He leaped for the opening again and fell sprawling on the dirt floor. He started to spring up——
But he suddenly grew inert, breathing deeply. There was still air close to the ground. Strange he hadn't thought of it before,—just to lie still, face close to the dirt. It pained him to breathe; his eyes throbbed and burned, but at least it was life. He pressed his face to the cool earth.
Yet unconsciousness was sweeping him again. He would feel himself drifting, then with all the faltering power of his will he would struggle back. But perhaps this sweet oblivion was only sleep. His nerves were crying for rest. Once more he floated, and the hours of night crept by.
When Bill wakened again, the last pale glimmer of the lighted smoke was gone. He was bewildered at first, confusing reality with his dreams, but soon the full memory of the night's events swept back to him. His faculties had rallied now, his thought was clearer. The few hours that he had rested had been his salvation.
Yet it was still night. He raised his hands before his eyes but could not see even their outline. And the cabin was still full of smoke. But it seemed somewhat less dense now, less pungent. But the smarting in his eyes was more intense.
The fire had evidently burned down and out. He struggled to open his eyes, then gazed around the walls in search of the opening in the door. But he could not see the reflection of an ember. He fought his way to his feet.
His fumbling hands encountered the log walls; he then groped about till he found the plank door. His gloved hands smarted, but their sense of touch did no seem blunted. He had never known a darker night! Now that he found the hole in the door, it was curious that he could not see one star gleaming through. But perhaps clouds had overspread.
A measure of heat against his face told him that coals were still glowing under the ashes, yet he might be able to creep through. It was worth a trial: the smoke in the cabin was still almost unbearable. His muscles were more at his command now; with a great lurch he sprang up and thrust head and shoulders through the opening.
The hot ashes punished his face, and his hand encountered hot coals as he thrust them through. Yet with a mighty effort he pushed on until his wrists touched the icy snow. He knew that he was safe.
He stood erect, scarcely believing in his deliverance. And the snow had crusted during the night; it would almost hold him up without snowshoes. As soon as the light came, he could mush on toward his Twenty-three Mile cabin. It would be a cold and exhausting march, but he could make it. The night was bitter now, assailing him like a scourge the moment he left the warm cabin; and the temperature would continue to fall until after dawn. The wind still blew the snow dust—a stinging lash from the north and west—and it had brought the cold from the Bering Sea.
It was curious that a cloudy night could be so cold. Yet when he opened his eyes he could not see the gleam of a star. The red coals of the fire, too, were smothered and obscured in ashes. He stepped toward them, intending to rake them up for such heat as they could yield. Presently he halted, gazing with fascinated horror at the ground.
He was suddenly struck with a ghastly and terrible possibility. He could not give it credence, yet the thought seemed to seize and chill him like a great cold. But he would know the truth in a moment. It was always his creed: not to spare himself the truth. Surely it would simply be an interesting story—this of his great fear—when he returned with his backload of supplies to Virginia. Something to talk about, in the painful and embarrassed moments that remained before Virginia and her lover went out of his sight forever.
His hand groped for a match. In his eagerness it broke off at his fingers as he tried to strike it. But soon he found another.
He heard it crack in the silence, but evidently it was a dud! The darkness before his eyes remained unbroken.
Filled with a sick fear, he removed his glove and passed his hand over the upheld match. There was no longer a possibility for doubt. The tiny flame smarted his flesh.
"Blind!" he cried. "Out here in the snow and the forest—blind!"
It was true. The pungent wood smoke had done a cruel work. Until time should heal the wounds of the tortured lenses, Bill was blind.
Standing motionless in the dreadful gloom of blindness, insensible to the growing cold, Bill made himself look his situation in the face. His mind was no longer blunt and dull. It was cool, analytic; he balanced one thing against another; he judged the per cent. of his chance. At present it did not occur to him to give up. It is never the way of the sons of the wilderness to yield without a fight. They know life in all its travail and pain, but also they know the Cold and Darkness and Fear that is death. No matter how long the odds are, the wilderness creature fights to his last breath. Bill had always fought; his life had been a great war of which birth was the reveille and death would be retreat.
He was wholly self-contained, his mind under perfect discipline. He would figure it all out and seek the best way through. Long, weary miles of trackless forest stretched between him and safety. There was no food in this cabin, no blankets; and the fire was out. His Twenty-three Mile cabin was only slightly less distant than the one he had left. And through those endless drifts and interminable forests the blind, unaided, could not find their way.
He could conceive of no circumstances whereby Virginia and Harold would come to look for him short of another day and night. They did not expect him back until the end of the present day; they could not possible start forth to seek him until another daylight. And this man knew what the forest and the cold would do to him in twenty-four hours. Already the cold was getting to him.
For all that he had no food, he knew that if he could keep warm he could survive until help came. Yet men cannot fast in these winter woods as they can in the South. The simple matter of inner fuel is a desperate and an essential thing. But he had no blankets, and without a fire he would die, speedily and surely. He didn't deceive himself on this point. He knew the northern winter only too well. A few hours of suffering, then a slow warmth that stole through the veins and was the herald of departure. He had been warmed through in the cabin, but that warmth would soon pass away. He wondered if he could rebuild the fire.
He was suddenly shaken with terror at the thought that already he did not know in what direction the fire and the cabin lay. He had become turned around when he strode out to light the match. Instantly he began to search for the cabin door. He went down on his hands in the snow, groping, then moved in a slow, careful circle. Just one little second's bewilderment, one variation from the circle, and he might lose the cabin altogether. That meantdeath!It could mean no other thing.
But in a moment the smoke blew into his face, and he advanced into the ashes. The next moment, by circling again, he found the cabin door. He leaned against it, breathing hard.
"It won't do, Bill," he told himself. "Hold steady—for one minute more."
A spruce log, the last segment of the tree he had cut, lay somewhere a few feet from his door. But he remembered it had fallen into a thicket of evergreen: could he find it now? The log would not burn until it was cut up with his ax: the ax would be hard to find in the pressing darkness. Even if he found it, even if he could cut kindling with his knife, he couldn't maintain a blaze. Building and mending a fire with green timber is a cruel task even with vision; and he knew as well as he knew the fact of his own life that it would be wholly impossible to the blind.
Then what was left? Only a deeper, colder darkness than this he knew now. Death was left—nothing else. In an hour, perhaps in a half-hour, possibly not until the night had gone and come again with its wind and its chill, the end would be the same. There was no light to guide him home, no landmarks that he could see.
Then his thought seized upon an idea so fantastic, seemingly so impossible of achievement, that at first he could not give it credence. His mind had flashed to those unfortunates that had sometimes lost their way in the dark chambers of an underground cavern and thence to that method by which they guarded against this danger. These men carried strings, unwinding them as they entered the cavern and following them out. He had not carried a string-end here, but he had made a trail! His snowshoe tracks probably were not yet obliterated under the wind-blown snow. Could he feel his way along them back to the cabin?
The miles were many and long, but he wouldn't have to creep on hands and knees all the way. Perhaps he could walk, stooped, touching the depressions in the snow at every step. In his own soul he did not believe that he had one chance in a hundred of making it through to safety. Crawling, creeping, groping from track to track would wear him out quickly. But was there any other course for him? If he didn't try that, would he have any alternative other than to lie still and die? He wasn't sure that he could even find the tracks in the snow, but if he were able to encircle the cabin at a radius of fifty feet he could not miss them. He groped about at the side of the cabin for his snowshoes.
He found them in a minute, then walked straight as he could fifty feet out from the door. Once more he went on hands and feet, groping in the icy snow. He started to make a great circle.
Fifteen feet farther he felt a break in the even surface. The snow had been so soft and his shoes had sunk so deep that the powdered flakes the wind had strewn during the night had only half filled his tracks. He started to follow them down.
He walked stooped, groping with one hand, and after an endless time his fingers dipped into dry, warm ashes.
Only for a fraction of a second did he fail to understand. And in the darkness and the silence the man's breath caught in what was almost a sob. He realized that he had followed the tracks in the wrong direction, and had traced them straight to the cabin door that he had just left.
It was only a matter of a hundred feet, but it was tragedy here. Once more he started on the out-trail.
He soon found that he could not walk in his present stooped position. Human flesh is not build to stand such a strain as that. Before he had gone half a mile sharp pains began to attack him, viciously, in the back and thighs. For all his magnificent strength—largely returned to him in his hours of rest—he could not progress in this position more than half a mile farther.
He took another course. He would walk ahead five paces, then drop down and grope again for the tracks. Sometimes he found them at once, often he had to go on his hands and feet and start to circle. Then, finding the trail, he would mush on for five steps more.
Oh, the way was cruel! He could not see to avoid the stinging lash of the spruce needles, the cruel blows of the branches. Already the attempt began to partake of a quality of nightmare,—a blind and stumbling advance over infinite difficulties through the infinity of time. It was like some torment of an evil Hereafter,—eternal, remorseless, wholly without hope. Many times he sprawled at full length, and always it was harder to force himself to his feet.
Five steps on, halting and groping, then five steps more: thus the lone figure journeyed through the winter forest. The seconds dragged into the minutes, the minutes into hours. The cold deepened; likely it was the bitter hour just after dawn. The hand with which he groped for the tracks had lost all power of feeling.
He could not judge distance or time. Already it seemed to him that he had been upon the journey endless hours. Because of the faint grayness before his eyes he judged it was broad daylight: perhaps already the day was giving over to darkness. He didn't know how far he had come. The only thought he had left was always to count his terrible five steps, and count five more.
Nothing else mattered. He had for the moment at least lost sight of all other things. His thought was not so clear now; it seemed to him that the forest was no longer silent. There were confused murmurings in his ear, a curious confusion and perplexity in his brain. It was hard to remember who he was and where he was going. Just to count his steps, stoop, grope and find the snowshoe trail, then journey on again.
He tried to increase the number of steps between his gropings—first six, then seven. Above seven, however, the trail was so hard to find that time was lost rather than gained. Yes, he thought it was still daylight. Sometimes he seemed to feel the sunlight on his face. He was not cold now, and even the pain was gone from his hips and thighs.
He was mistaken in this, however. The pain still sent its fearful messages to his brain, but in his growing stupor he was no longer aware of them. Even his hand didn't hurt him now. He wondered if it were frozen; yet it was still sensitive to the depressions in the drifts. It could still grope through the snow and find the tracks.
"I can't go on!" his voice suddenly spoke aloud. "I can't go—any more."
The words seemed to come from an inner man, without volition on his part. He was a little amazed to hear them. Yet the time had not yet come to stop and rest. The tracks still led him on.
Always, it seemed to him, he had to grope longer to find the indentations in the snow. The simple reason was that the motor centers of his brain had begun to be impaired by cold and exhaustion, and he could no longer walk in a straight line. He found out, however, that the trail usually lay to the right rather than to his left. He was taking a shorter step with his left than with his right—the same tendency that often makes a tried woodsman walk in a great circle—and he thus bore constantly to the left. Soon it became necessary to drop his formula down to six, then to the original five.
On and on, through the long hours. But the fight was almost done. Exhaustion and hunger, but cold most of all, were swiftly breaking him down. He advanced with staggering steps.
The indentations were more shallow now. The point where he had begun to break through the snow crust, because of the softening snow, was passed long ago: only because he was in a valley sheltered from the wind were the tracks manifest at all.
The time came at last when he could no longer get upon his feet. And now, like a Tithonus who could not die, he crawled along the snowshoe trail on is hands and knees. "I can't go on," he told himself. "I'm through!" Yet always his muscles made one movement more.
Suddenly he missed the trail. His hand groped in vain over the white crust. He crept on a few more feet, then as ever, began to circle. Soon his hand found an indentation in the snow crust, and he started to creep forward again.
But slowly the conviction grew upon him that he was crawling in a small circle,—the very circle he had just made. Some way, he had missed the snowshoe trail. He did not remember how on his journey out he had once been obliged to backtrack a hundred yards and start on at a new angle. He had merely come to that point from which he had turned back. He could not find the trail because he was at its end.
He could not remember that it was his own trail. How he came here, his purpose and his destination, were all lost and forgotten in the intricate mazes of the past. He had but one purpose, one theme,—to keep to his trail an journey on. He would make a bigger circle. He started to creep forward in the snow.
But as he waited, on hands and knees in the drifts, the Spirit of Mercy came down to him and gave him one moment of lucid thought. All at once full consciousness returned to him in a sweep as of a tide, and he remembered all that had occurred. He saw all things in their exact relations. And now he knew his course.
No longer would he struggle on, slave to the remorseless instinct of self-preservation. Was there any glory, any happiness at his journey's end that would pay him for the agony of one more forward step? He had waged a mighty battle; but now—in a flash—he realized that the spoil for which he had fought was not worth one moment of his hours of pain. He remembered Virginia, Harold, the mind and its revelation: he recalled that his mission had been merely an expedition after provisions so that the two could go out of his life. Was there any reason why he should fight for life, only to find death?
There was nothing in the distant cabin worth having now. He was suddenly crushed with bitterness at the thought that he had made this mighty effort for a goal not worth attaining. If he struggled on, even to success, the only thing that waited him was a moment of farewell with Virginia and the vision of her slipping away from him, into her lover's arms. When she departed only the forest and the darkness would be left, and he had these here.
It would be different if he felt Virginia still needed him. If he could win her any happiness by fighting on, the struggle would still be worth while. But she had Harold to show her the way through the winter woods. It was true that they would have to rely on the fallen grizzly for meat: an uncomfortable experience, but nothing to compare with any further movement through the cruel drifts. Harold would come back and claim the mine; perhaps he would even erect his own notice before his departure, and the Rutheford family would know the full fruits of their crime of long ago. But it didn't matter. The only thing that mattered now was rest and sleep.
Slowly he sank down in the snow.