GAMBLING WITH DEATH
Beyond giving his horse a safe headway from the shelter, de Spain made
little effort to guide her. He had chosen the Lady, not because she
was fresher, for she was not, but because he believed she possessed of
the three horses the clearest instinct to bring her through the fight
for the lives that were at stake. He did not deceive himself with the
idea he could do anything to help the beast find a way to succor; that
instinct rested wholly in the Lady's head, not in his. He only knew
that if she could not get back to help, he could not. His own part in
the effort was quite outside any aid to the Lady--it was no more than
to reach alive whatever aid she could find, that he might direct it to
where Nan and her companion would endure a few hours longer the fury
of the storm.
His own struggle for life, he realized, was with the wind--the roaring
wind that hurled its broadsides of frozen snow in monstrous waves
across the maddened sky, challenging every living thing. It drove icy
knives into his face and ears, paralyzed in its swift grasp his
muscles and sinews, fought the stout flow of blood through his veins,
and searched his very heart to still it.
Encouraging the Lady with kind words, and caressing her in her groping
efforts as she turned head and tail from the blinding sheets of snow
and ice, de Spain let her drift, hoping she might bring them through,
what he confessed in his heart to be, the narrowest of chances.
He bent low in his saddle under the unending blasts. He buffeted his
legs and arms to fight off the fatal cold. He slipped more than once
from his seat, and with a hand on the pommel tramped beside the horse
to revive his failing circulation; there would come a time, he
realized, when he could no longer climb up again, but he staved that
issue off to the last possible moment of endurance, because the Lady
made better time when he was on her back. When the struggle to remount
had been repeated until nature could no longer by any staggering
effort be made to respond to his will, until his legs were no longer a
part of his benumbed being--until below his hips he had no body
answerable to his commands, but only two insensible masses of lead
that anchored him to the ground--he still forced the frozen feet to
carry him, in a feeble, monstrous gait beside the Lady, while he
dragged with his hands on the saddle for her patient aid.
One by one every thought, as if congealed in their brain cells,
deserted his mind--save the thought that he must not freeze to death.
More than once he had hoped the insensate fury of the blizzard might
abate. The Lady had long since ceased to try to face it--like a
stripped vessel before a hurricane, she was drifting under it. De
Spain realized that his helpless legs would not carry him farther. His
hands, freezing to the pommel, no longer supported him. They finally
slipped from it and he fell prostrate in the snow beside his horse.
When he would cry out to her his frozen lips could mumble no words. It
was the fight no longer of a man against nature, but only of an
indomitable soul against a cruel, hateful death. He struggled to his
feet only to fall again more heavily. He pulled himself up this time
by the stirrup-strap, got his hands and arms up to the pommel, and
clung to it for a few paces more. But he fell at last, and could no
longer rise from the ground. The storm swept unceasingly on.
The Lady, checked by the lines wrapped on his arm, stopped. De Spain
lay a moment, then backed her up a step, pulled her head down by the
bridle, clasped his wooden arms around her neck, spoke to her and,
lifting her head, the mare dragged him to his feet. Clumsily and
helplessly he loosened the tugs and the whiffletree, beat his hands
together with idiotic effort, hooked the middle point of the
whiffletree into the elbow of his left arm, brought the forearm and
hand up flat against his shoulder, and with the hitching-strap lashed
his forearm and upper arm tightly together around the whiffletree.
He drew the tugs stiffly over the Lady's back, unloosed the cinches of
the saddle, pushed it off the horse and, sinking into the snow behind
her, struck with his free arm at her feet. Relieved of the saddle, the
Lady once more started, dragging slowly behind her through the snow a
still breathing human being. Less than an hour before it had been a
man. It was hardly more now, as the Lady plodded on, than an insensate
log. But not even death could part it again from the horse to which de
Spain, alive, had fastened it.
The fearful pain from the tortured arm, torn at times almost from its
socket, the gradual snapping of straining ligaments, the constant
rupture of capillaries and veins sustained his consciousness for a
while. Then the torturing pain abated, the rough dragging shattered
the bruised body less. It was as if the Lady and the storm together
were making easier for the slowly dying man his last trail across the
desert. He still struggled to keep alive, by sheer will-power,
flickering sparks of consciousness, and to do so concentrated every
thought on Nan. It was a poignant happiness to summon her picture to
his fainting senses; he knew he should hold to life as long as he
could think of her. Love, stronger than death, welled in his heart.
The bitter cold and the merciless wind were kinder as he called her
image from out of the storm. She seemed to speak--to lift him in her
arms. Ahead, distant mountains rose, white-peaked. The sun shone. He
rode with her through green fields, and a great peace rested on his
weary senses.
* * * * *
Lady Jane, pushing on and on, enlightened by that instinct before
which the reason of man is weak and pitiful, seeing, as it were,
through the impenetrable curtain of the storm where refuge lay,
herself a slow-moving crust of frozen snow, dragged to her journey's
end--to the tight-shut doors of the Calabasas barn--her unconscious
burden, and stood before them patiently waiting until some one should
open for her. It was one of the heartbreaks of a tragic day that no
one ever knew just when the Lady reached the door or how long she and
her unconscious master waited in the storm for admission. A startled
exclamation from John Lefever, who had periodically and anxiously
left the red-hot stove in the office to walk moodily to the window,
brought the men tumbling over one another as he ran from his
companions to throw open the outer door and pull the drooping horse
into the barn.
It was the Indian, Scott, who, reading first of all the men everything
in the dread story, sprang forward with a stifled exclamation, as the
horse dragged in the snow-covered log, whipped a knife from his
pocket, cut the incumbered arm and white hand free from the
whiffletree and, carrying the stiffened body into the office, began
with insane haste to cut away the clothing.
Lefever, perceiving it was de Spain thus drawn to their feet, shouted,
while he tore from the blade of Scott's knife the frozen garments, the
orders for the snow, the heated water, the warm blankets, the alcohol
and brandy, and, stripped to his waist, chafed the marble feet. The
Indian, better than a staff of doctors, used the cunning of a sorcerer
to revive the spark of inanimate life not yet extinguished by the
storm. A fearful interval of suspense followed the silence into which
the work settled, a silence broken only by the footsteps of men
running to and from the couch over which Scott, Lefever, and McAlpin,
half-naked, worked in mad concert.
De Spain opened his eyes to wander from one to the other of the faces.
He half rose up, struggling in a frenzy with the hands that restrained
him. While his companions pleaded to quiet him, he fought them until,
restored to its seat of reason, his mind reasserted itself and, lying
exhausted, he told them in his exquisite torture of whom he had left,
and what must be done to find and bring them in.
While the relief wagons, equipped with straining teams and flanked by
veteran horsemen, were dashing out of the barn, he lapsed into
unconsciousness. But he had been able to hold Scott's hand long enough
to tell him he must find Nan and bring her in, or never come back.
It was Scott who found her. In their gropings through the blizzard the
three had wandered nearer Calabasas than any one of them dreamed. And
on the open desert, far south and east of the upper lava beds, it was
Scott's horse that put a foot through the bottom of the overturned
wagon box. The suspected mound of snow, with the buried horses
scrambling to their feet, rose upright at the crash. Duke crouched,
half-conscious, under the rude shelter. Lying where he had placed her,
snugly between the horses, Scott found Nan. He spoke to her when she
opened her staring eyes, picked her up in his arms, called to his
companions for the covered wagon, and began to restore her, without a
moment of delay, to life. He even promised if she would drink the
hateful draft he put to her lips and let him cut away her shoes and
leggings and the big coat frozen on her, that in less than an hour she
should see Henry de Spain alive and well.