There were a number of axes in the little work-room that comprised one
end of the long cabin, and Doomsdorf flung three of them over his
shoulder. “Right up through here,” he urged, pointing to the little
hillside behind the cabin. “Of course I can’t let you cut fuel from
these trees so close to the house. You, as city people, surely know
something about house beautifying. You’ll have to carry the wood a
little farther—but you won’t mind, when you know it’s for the sake of
beauty.”
The snow was noticeably deeper in the two hours since they had come. It
clung to Ned’s trouser legs almost to the knees, soaking through his
thin walking shoes; and both he and Bess found it some degree of labor
just to push through it. Doomsdorf halted them before one of the
half-grown spruce.
“Here’s a good one,” he commented. “Just beyond is another. You can each
take one—cut them down with your axes and then hack them into two-foot
lengths for the stove. Better split each length into three pieces—the
larger ones, anyway. If you have time, you can carry it down to the
cabin.”
He swung his axes down from his shoulder. He seemed to be handling them
with particular care, but several seconds elapsed before Ned realized
that the moment had some slight element of drama. Heretofore he had been
unable to observe that Doomsdorf was in the least on guard against his
prisoners. He had seemingly taken no obvious precautions in his own
defense. It was plain to see, however, that he did not intend to put
axes into the hands of these two foes until he had one ready to swing
himself.
He took the handle of the largest axe in his right hand; with his left
he extended the other two implements, blades up, to Ned and Bess. “I
suppose you know we’ve had no experience——” Ned began.
“It doesn’t matter. Just be careful the trees don’t fall on you. They
sometimes do, you know, on amateur woodsmen. The rest is plain brute
strength and awkwardness.” He handed them each, from his pocket, a piece
of dried substance that looked like bark. “Here’s a piece of jerked
caribou each—it ought to keep life in your bodies. And the sooner you
get your wood cut and split, the sooner you see any more.”
Then he turned and left them to their toil.
Thus began a bitter hour for Ned. He found the mere work of biting
through the thick trunk with his axe cost him his breath and strained
his patience to the limit. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. He did not
strike true; the blade made irregular white gashes in the bark; his
blows seemed to lack power. The great, ragged wound deepened but slowly.
Finally it was half through the trunk, and yet the tree stood seemingly
as sturdy as ever. Reckless from fatigue, he chopped on more fiercely
than ever. And suddenly, with the grinding noise of breaking wood, the
tree started to fall.
And at that instant Ned was face to face with the exigency of leaping
for his life. The tree did not fall in the direction planned. An instant
before, weary and aching and out of breath, Ned would have believed
himself incapable of swift and powerful motion. As that young spruce
shattered down toward him, like the club of a giant aimed to strike out
his life, a supernatural power seemed to snatch him to one side. Without
realization of effort, the needed muscles contracted with startling
force, and he sprang like a distance jumper to safety.
But he didn’t jump too soon or too far. The branches of the tree lashed
at him as it descended, hurling him headlong in the snow. And thereafter
there were three things to cause him thought.
One of them was the attitude of Bess,—the girl to whom, in weeks past,
he had shown hardly decent courtesy: the same girl whom in childish fury
he had cursed the bitter, eventful night just gone. Above the roar of
the falling tree he heard her quick, half-strangled gasp of horror.
The sound seemed to have the qualities that made toward a perfect
after-image; because in the silence that followed, as he lay in the soft
snow, and the crash of the fallen tree echoed into nothingness, it still
lingered, every tone perfect and clear, in his mind’s ear. There was no
denying its tone of ineffable dismay. Evidently Bess was of a forgiving
disposition; in spite of his offense of the past night she had evidently
no desire to see him crushed into jelly under that giant’s blow. Some
way, it had never occurred to him that the girl would harbor a kind
thought for him again. She had been right and he had been wrong; in an
effort to serve him she had received only his curse, and her present
desperate position, worse perhaps than either his own or Lenore’s, was
due wholly to his own folly. She had not taken part in the orgy of the
night before, so not the least echo of responsibility could be put on
her. Yet she didn’t hate him. She had cried out in real agony when she
thought he was about to die.
He thought upon this matter as he lay in the soft snow whence the
descending branches of the tree had hurled him. He didn’t have many
seconds to think about it. Further eccentricity on the part of Bess
swiftly gave him additional cause for reflection. She had not only cried
out, but she ran to him with the speed of a deer. She was by his side
almost before he was aware of the scope of the accident.
The sobbing cry he had heard could very likely be attributed merely to
that instinctive horror that a sensitive girl would feel at an impending
tragedy, wholly apart from personal interest in the victim; but for a
few seconds Ned was absolutely at a loss to explain that drawn, white,
terrified face above him. In fear for him, Bess was almost at the point
of absolute collapse herself. Nor could mere impersonal horror explain
her flying leap to reach his side,—like a snowbird over the drifts. It
meant more than mere forgiveness for the terrible pass to which he had
brought her. In a few seconds of clear thinking he thought he saw the
truth: that even after all that was past Bess still looked to him for
her hope, that she regarded him still as her defense against Doomsdorf;
and that his death would leave her absolutely bereft. He was a man, and
she still dreamed that he might save her.
The result was a quick sense of shame of his own inadequacy. It is not
good to know oneself a failure in the face of woman’s trust. Yet the
effect of the little scene was largely good, for it served to strengthen
Ned’s resolve to spare the girls in every way he could, and by his own
feigned hope to keep them from despair. Above all, he found an increased
admiration for Bess. Instead of a silly prude, a killjoy for the party,
she had shown herself as a sportswoman to the last fiber. She had been a
friend when she had every right to be an enemy; she had shown spirit and
character when women of lesser metal would have been irremediably
crushed. He was far away now from the old barriers of caste. There was
no reason, on this barren, dreadful isle, why he shouldn’t accept all
the friendship she would give him and give his own in return.
But this subject was only one of three that suddenly wakened him to
increased mental activity. If he were amazed at Bess, he was no less
amazed at himself. He had been tired out, hopeless, out of wind, hardly
able to swing his arms, and yet he had managed to leap out of seeming
certain death. The unmistakable inference was that the body in which his
spirit had dwelt for thirty years had strength and possibilities of
which hitherto he had been unaware. In the second of crisis he had shown
a perfect coördination of brain and muscle, an accuracy of transmission
of the brain-messages that were conducted along his nerves, and a
certain sureness of instinct that he had never dreamed he possessed. It
would have been very easy to have jumped the wrong way. Yet he had
jumped the right way—the only possible way to avoid death—choosing
infallibly the nearest point of safety and hurling himself directly
toward it. Perhaps it would have been better to have stayed where he
was, to have let the tree crush the life out of him and be done with
Hell Isle for good, yet a power beyond himself had carried him out of
danger. The point offered interesting possibilities. Could it be that he
had had the makings of a man in him all these years and had never been
aware of it? Could he dare hope that this side of him might be
developed, in the hard years to come, so that he might be better able to
endure the grinding toil and hardship? The thought wasn’t really
_hope_—he didn’t believe that _hope_ would ever visit him again—it was
only an instant’s rift, dim as twilight, in the gloom of his despair.
The most he could ever hope to do was to fortify himself in order to
take more and more of the girl’s hardship upon his shoulders.
Thirdly he gave some thought to the matter of felling trees. It was a
more complex matter than he had at first supposed. Evidently he had gone
about it in the wrong way. It would pay to have more respect for the
woodsman’s science if he did not wish to come to an early end beneath a
falling tree. He might not be so quick to dodge again.
Bess was staring wide-eyed into his face; and he smiled quietly in
reassurance. “Not hurt at all,” he told her. Quickly he climbed to his
feet. “See that you don’t do the same thing that I did.”
Delighted that he had not been hurt but a little aghast at what heart’s
secret she might have revealed in running to his aid, she started to go
back to her toil. But Ned had already reached some conclusions about
tree-felling. He walked with her to her fallen axe, then inspected the
deep cut she had already made in her tree.
“You’re doing the same thing I did, sure enough,” he observed. “The tree
will fall your way and crush you. Let me think.”
A moment later he took his axe and put in a few more strokes in the same
place. It was the danger point, he thought: a deeper cut might fell the
tree prematurely. Presently he crossed to the opposite side, signaled
Bess out of danger, and began to hack the tree again, making a cut
somewhat above that started on the other side of the trunk. He chopped
sturdily; and in a moment the tree started to fall, safely and in an
opposite direction.
He uttered some small sound of triumph; but it was a real tragedy to
have the tree fall against a near-by tree and lodge. Again he had failed
to exercise proper foresight.
There was nothing to do but climb into the adjoining tree with his axe
and laboriously cut the lodged tree away. In the meantime Bess went to
work on the first tree felled, trimming it of its limbs so to cut it
into lengths.
Ned joined her at the work, but long before the first tree was cut into
fuel, both were at the edge of utter exhaustion. The point of fatigue he
had reached that morning in rowing, when he had rested from the sheer
inability to take another stroke, was already far past. There had been a
point, some time back, when every muscle of his body had throbbed with a
burning ache, when pain crept all over him like a slow fire, but that
too was largely passed now. His brain was dulled; he felt baffled and
estranged as if in a dream. It was more like a nightmare now,—his axe
swinging eternally in his arms, the chips flying, one after another.
He seemed to move so slowly. Hours were passing, one after another, and
still great lengths of the trees remained to cut and split. But they
couldn’t stop and rest. They dared not return to the cabin till the work
was done: the brute that was their master would be glad of an excuse to
lay on the lash. They had been taught what mercy to expect from him.
Here was one reality that their fatigue could not blunt: their cruel
master waiting in the cabin. As the rest of their conscious world faded
and dimmed he was ever more vivid, ever more real. The time soon came
when he filled all the space in their thoughts.
For Ned life was suddenly immensely simplified. All the complexities of
his old life had suddenly ceased to matter: indeed that had perished
from his consciousness. The world was forgotten, he had no energy to
waste in remembering how he had come hence, even who he was. From the
supreme egoist, knowing no world but that of which his own ego was the
orbit, to a faltering child hardly aware of his own identity: thus had
Ned changed in a single night. The individual who had been Ned Cornet
had almost ceased to be; and in his place was a helpless pawn of a cruel
and remorseless fate.
He knew Fate now. Through the mists of this nightmare that was upon him
he saw the Jester with his bells. And as he looked, the sharp, ironic
face grew savage, brutal, half-covered with blond hair; the motley
became a cap of silver fox. But this changed too, as his axe swung in
the air. Once more the face was sharp, but still unutterably terrible to
see; but it was livid now, as if sulphurous flames were playing upon it.
And the foot—he saw the foot plain against the snow. It was
unspeakable, filling him with cold horror all his length. It was some
way cloven and ghastly.
The vision passed, broken and dissolved by the noise of the axe on the
tough wood. He knew Fate now. He had seen him in all his forms. In his
folly he had scorned him, taunted him by his insolence, had dared to
dream that he was greater than Fate, immune from his persecution. If
this torment ended now, he had paid the price. He had atoned for
everything already if he did not lift the axe again. Yet only eternity
lay ahead.
Doomsdorf had seemed almost incredible to him at first. It was as if he
couldn’t possibly be true: a figment of nightmare that would vanish as
soon as he wakened. But he was real enough now. Nothing was left to him
but the knowledge how real he was.
He must not rest, he must not pause till the work was done. The fact
that Bess had fallen, fainting, in the snow, did not affect him; he must
swing his axe and hew the wood. Day was dying. Grayness was creeping in
from the sea. It was like the essence of the sea itself, all gray, gray
like his dreams, gray like the ashes of his hopes. He must finish the
two trees before the darkness came down and kept him from seeing where
to sink the blade. Otherwise it wouldn’t matter—day or night, one year
or another. Time had ceased to count; seemingly it had almost ceased to
move. But the _knout_ would be waiting, hardened and sharp with wire, if
he didn’t do his work. Cold fear laid hold of him again.
He did not know that this cold that was upon him was not only that of
fear. His clothes had been wet through by perspiration and melted snow,
and now the bitter winds off the sea were getting to him. Still he swung
his axe. It was always harder to strike true; the tough lengths took
ever more blows to split. The time soon came when he was no longer aware
of the blows against the wood. The axe swung automatically in his arms;
even sense of effort was gone from him. The only reality that lived in
him now, in that misty twilight, was the knowledge that he must get
through.
It was too dark to see, now, how much of the work remained. The night
was cheating him, after all. He struck once more at the tough length
that lay at his feet—a piece at which he had already struck uncounted
blows. He gave all his waning strength to the effort.
The length split open, but the axe slipped out of his bleeding hands,
falling somewhere in the shadows beyond. He must crawl after it; he
didn’t know how many more lengths there were to split. It was strange
that he couldn’t keep his feet. And how deep and still was the night
that dropped over him!
How long he groped for the axe handle in the snow he never knew. But he
lay still at last. Twilight deepened about him, and the wind wept like a
ghost risen from the sea. The very flame of his life was burning down to
embers.
Thus it came about that Doomsdorf missed the sound of his axe against
the wood. Swinging a lantern, a titantic figure among the snow-laden
trees, he tramped down to investigate. Bess, semi-conscious again,
wakened when the lantern light danced into her eyes. But it took him
some little time to see Ned’s dark form in the snow.
The reason was, it was lying behind a mighty pile of split fuel. The
light showed that only green branches, too small to be of value,
remained of the two spruce. And Doomsdorf grunted, a wondering oath,
deep in his throat.
They had been faithful slaves. Putting his mighty arm around them, each
in turn, he half carried, half dragged them into the warmth of the
cabin.