The shot that wounded Jeffery Neilson carried far through the forest
aisles, re√ęchoing against the hills, and arresting, for one breathless
moment, all the business of the wilderness. The feeding caribou swung
his horns and tried to catch the scent; the moose, grubbing for water
roots in the lake bottom, lifted his grotesque head and stood like a
form in black iron. It came clear as a voice to the cavern where Ben
lay.
The man started violently in his cot. His entire nervous system seemed
to react. Then there ensued a curious state in which his physical
functions seemed to cease,--his heart motionless in his breast, his body
tensely rigid, his breath held. There was an infinite straining and
travail in his mind.
The truth was that the sound acted much as a powerful stimulant to his
retarded nervous forces. It was the one thing his resting nerve-system
needed; it was as if chemicals were in suspension in a crucible, and at
a slight jar of the glass they made mysterious union and expelled a
precipitation. Almost instantly he recognized the sound that had reached
him, with a clear and unmistakable recognition such as he had not
experienced since the night of the accident, as the report of a rifle.
His mind gave a great leap and remembered its familiar world.
A rifle--probably discharged by Beatrice in a hunt after big game. It
was true that their meat supply was low; he remembered now. Yet it was
curious that she should be hunting after dark. The gloom was deep at
the cavern mouth. Besides, he had always kept his rifle from her,
fearing that she might turn it against him. He looked about him, trying
to locate the source of the flood of light on the cavern floor. It was
the moon, and it showed that the girl was gone. He started to sit up.
But his left arm did not react just properly to the command of his
brain. It impeded him, and its old strength was impaired. For a moment
more he lay quiet, deep in thought. Of course--he had been injured by
the falling tree. He remembered clearly, now. And the rifle had been
broken.
The only possible explanation for the shot was that a rifle had been
fired by some invader in their valley--in all probability Neilson or one
of his men. Beatrice's absence would also indicate this fact: perhaps
she had already joined her father and was on her way back to Snowy Gulch
with him. In that case, why had he himself been spared?
He looked out of the door of the cavern, trying to get some idea of the
lateness of the hour. The very quality of the darkness indicated that
the night was far advanced. Neilson would not be hunting game at this
hour. Was his own war--planned long ago--even now being waged in ways
beyond his ken?
His old concern for Beatrice swept through him. With considerable
difficulty he got to his feet, then holding on to the wail, guided
himself to the shelf where they ordinarily kept their little store of
matches. He scratched one of them against the wall.
In the flaring light his eyes made a swift but careful appraisal of his
surroundings. The girl's cot had not been slept in; and to his great
amazement he saw that their food supplies were spent. Still holding to
the wall he walked to the cave mouth.
Instantly his keen eyes saw the far-off gleam of the camp fire on the
distant margin of the lake. For all that the hour was late, it burned
high and bright. He watched it, vaguely conscious of the insidious
advance of a ghastly fear. Beatrice was his ally now--if these weeks had
sent home one fact to him it was this--and her absence might easily
indicate that she was helpless in the enemy's hands. The thing suggested
ugly possibilities. Yet he could not aid her. He could scarcely walk;
even the knife that he wore at his belt was missing, probably carried by
Beatrice when she gathered roots in the woods.
But presently all questions as to his course were settled for him. His
straining ear caught the faintest, almost imperceptible vibration in the
air--a soundwave so dim and obscure that it seemed impossible that the
human mind could interpret it--but Ben recognized it in a flash. In some
great trouble and horror, in the sullen light of that distant camp fire,
Beatrice had screamed for aid.
Only by the grace of the Red Gods had he heard the sound at all. Except
for the fact that the half-mile intervening was as still as death, and
that half the way the sound sped over water, he couldn't have hoped to
perceive it. If the wind had blown elsewhere than straight toward him
from the enemy camp, or if his marvelous sense of hearing had been less
acute, the result would have been the same; and there could have been no
answer from this dark man at the cave mouth who stood so tense and
still. Finally, by instinct as much as by conscious intelligence, he
identified the sound, marked it as a reality rather than a fancy, and
read the tragic need behind it. Swiftly he started down the glade toward
her.
Yet in a moment he knew that unless he conserved his strength he could
not hope to make a fourth of the distance. At the first steps he swayed,
half staggering. He had paid the price for his weeks of illness and his
injuries. If he had been in a sick room, under a physician's care, he
would have believed it impossible to walk unsupported across the room.
But need is the mother of strength, and this was the test. Besides, he
had had several days of convalescence that had put back into his sinews
a measure of his mighty strength. Mostly he progressed by holding on to
the trees, pulling himself forward step by step.
Likely he would come too late to change the girl's fate. Yet even now he
knew he must not turn back. If the penalty were death, there must be no
hesitancy in him; he must not withhold one step.
But it was a losing fight. The hill itself seemed endless; a hundred
cruel yards of marsh must be traversed before ever he reached the
nearest point by the lake. The enemy camp from where Beatrice had called
to him lay on the far side of the lake, a distance of a full mile if he
followed around the curving shore. And black and bitter self-hatred
swept like fire through him when he realized that he could not possibly
keep on his feet for so long a way.
Was this all he had fought for--surging upward through these long, weary
weeks out of the shadow of death--only to fall dead on the trail in the
moment of Beatrice's need? Instantly he knew that nothing in his life,
no other desire or dream, had ever meant as much to him as this: that he
might reach her side in time. Even his desire for vengeance, in that
twilight madness, like Roland's, that had shaped his destiny, had been
wavering and feeble compared to this. And no moment of his existence had
ever been so dark, so bereft of the last, dim star of hope that lights
men's way in the deep night of despair.
He gave no thought to the fact of his own helplessness against three
armed men in case he did succeed in reaching their camp. The point could
not possibly be considered. The imperious instincts that forced him on
simply could not take it into reckoning. He knew only he must reach her
side and put in her service all that he had.
He fell again and again as he tried to make headway in the marsh. But
always he forced himself up and on. Only too plain he saw that the time
was even now upon him when he could no longer keep his feet at all. But
still he plunged on, and with tragically slow encroachments the shore
line drew up to him.
But he could not go on. The fire itself was hardly a quarter of a mile
distant, directly across the lake, but to follow the long shore was an
insuperable mile. Already his leg muscles were failing him, refusing to
the respond to the impulse of his nerves. Yet it might be that if he
could make himself heard his enemies would leave the girl for a moment,
at least--give her an instant's respite--while they came and dispatched
his own life. Whatever they were doing to her, there in that ring of
firelight, might be stayed for a moment, at least.
But at that instant he remembered the canoe. He had always kept it
hidden in a little thicket of tall reeds,--if only the girl had not
removed it from its place in his weeks of sickness! He plunged down into
the tall tules. Yes, the boat was still in place.
It took all the strength of his weakened body to push it out from the
reeds into the water. Then he seized the long pole they had sometimes
used to propel themselves over the lake. Except for his injured arm,
the paddle would have been better--he could have made better time and
escaped the danger of being stranded in deep water--but he doubted that
he could handle it with his faltering arm. He pushed off, putting most
of the strain on his uninjured right arm.
The canoe was strongly but lightly made, so that it could be portaged
with greatest possible ease; and his strokes, though feeble, propelled
it slowly through the water. The great, white full moon, beloved of long
ago, looked down from above the tall, dark heads of the spruce and
changed the little water-body into a miracle of burnished silver. In its
light Ben's face showed pale, but with a curious, calm strength.
The lake seemed untouched by the faint breath of wind that blew from the
distant shore. The waters lay quiet, and the trout beneath saw the black
shadow of the canoe as it passed. A cow moose and her calf sprang up the
bank with a splash, frightened by the poling figure in the stern. And on
the far shore, clear where the lake had its outlet in a small river,
even more keen wilderness eyes might have beheld the black, moving dot
that was the craft. But the distance was too far and the wind was wrong
for the keen mind behind the eyes to make any sort of an interpretation.
It might have been that Fenris the wolf, running with a female and two
younger males that he had mastered that long-ago night on the ridge,
paused in his hunting to watch and wonder. But his wild brute thoughts
were not under the bondage of memory to-night; his savage heart was
thrilled and full; and more than likely he did not even turn his head.
Ray and Chan, standing beside their prisoner in their grisly camp on the
opposite shore, might have beheld Ben's approach if weightier matters
had not occupied their minds. They had only to walk to the edge of the
firelight and stare down through a rift in the trees to see him. But
they stood with the angry glare revealing a strange and sinister
intentness in their drawn faces and ominous speculations in their evil
eyes.