Garth had no conscious design in running; his muscles merely reacted in
obedience to the grinding tumult in his brain. His eardrums rang with the
fancied sound of Natalie's cries; and his eyeballs were seared with the
picture of her shrinking in the brutal hands of Grylls. As he crashed
through the wood, the little branches whipped his face unmercifully; and
the spiny shoots of the jackpines tore his clothes. He ran full tilt into
unyielding obstacles; and was flung aside, unconscious of the shock.
He instinctively sought the other camp. He found it deserted; the tent
gone; the door of the empty cabin swinging idly in the wind. He came to
a stop then; and his arms dropped to his sides: without knowledge of the
direction they had taken; and without the craft to follow their tracks
in the grass, in his helplessness he hovered on the brink of sheer
madness. He was sharply called back to himself by the sound of a faint
groan from the edge of the cut-bank. A tinge of gray had by this time
been woven into the unrelieved blackness. Running toward the sound, he
found a human form prone in the grass; and he saw it was a woman lying
on her face. Grasping her shoulders, he rolled her over. It was Rina.
A tiny hope sprang in his breast. Here at last was a clue.
"Get up!" he said roughly.
She made no answer. From her limpness, and her cold, moist hands, Garth
apprehended that she was physically sick. Partly raising her, he poured
part of the contents of his flask down her throat. She choked, and
turned her head away.
"Let me be!" she murmured. "Let me die!"
The wildness in Garth's veins subsided. Here he had something tangible
to work upon; and his conscious brain resumed operations; prompting him
at first like a small, strange voice at an immense distance.
"Tell me what happened!" he said hoarsely. "If they have wronged you,
too, help me to find them, and we'll pay them off together!"
"No! I want die!" whispered Rina in a voice as dull and hopeless as the
sound of all-day rain in the grass. "I say I kill myself. He laugh. He
see me tak' bad medicine. He don' care. I fall down. He leave me. I
t'ink I die then. I ver' glad. But I tak' too much; and it only mak' my
stomach sick. Bam-by I try to go to lake and jomp in--but my head go
off!"
In spite of her unwillingness, Garth forced more of the stimulant down
her throat. Presently she was able to sit up. She bowed her back, and
buried her face in her crossed arms.
"Ride with me after them!" urged Garth. "They have less than an hour's
start! We will overtake them at their first camp. Rouse yourself!"
But Rina only shook her head; and continued to murmur: "He want me die!
He glad I die!"
Garth's desperate need brought craft to his aid. "Very well," he said
coolly. "I shoot him on sight! Mabyn goes first!"
Rina, touched home, raised an agitated face. "No! No!" she said
tremblingly. "Grylls, him took her--not 'Erbe't!"
"No matter!" he said, feigning to leave her. "Mabyn dies like a
dog--unless you come with me."
Rina struggled to her knees, and clutched at him. "Wait a minute!" she
stammered.
"Come with me, and I promise you his life, if I can save it," he urged.
"I will give it to you!"
She attempted to rise; and he lifted her. She stood swaying dizzily,
clinging to his arm for support.
"I come," she said faintly at last. "Tak' me to the water, then go get
your horses. When you come back I ride with you."
She stopped in the cabin, and got an herb she knew of to restore her.
Garth then carried her down the hill, and laying her at the brink of the
water, where she could drink and bathe her face, he hastened back to his
own shack.
It was now light enough to see a way through the wood. A spectral mist
hung suspended a few feet over the lake; beneath it the water was like a
steel cuirass, reflecting bordering foliage as black as jet. Charley had
gone for the horses as a matter of course and was even now landing them.
The boy's whilom rosy cheeks were as white as the mist; and his face was
twisted with pain. His jaw was set doggedly; and he worked ahead without
question or comment.
No orders were required; they laboured instinctively. Saddles were
carried out, and flung on the dripping beasts; and while Charley girthed
them, Garth rolled the blankets, and made three bundles of grub, as
heavy as he dared ask each horse to carry, in addition to his rider.
Natalie's little rifle he gave to Charley; the second Winchester had
been won back in the raid, and the twenty-two was the only other weapon
they possessed. In twenty minutes they were ready. Securing the door of
the hut against the entrance of animals, they hastened to pick up Rina.
They found her waiting, outwardly collected; her old walled, sullen
self--but in the early light her skin showed a deathly, yellowish gray.
Refusing any assistance, she climbed into the empty saddle without
comment; and mutely pointed the way over the hills to the west. Garth
lingered to affix a note to the door of the shack for those they
expected to follow.
As he caught up to them again, he overlooked his little party with the
eye of a commander. It was not a hopeful view: three wretched, half-fed
beasts he had, complaining at the very start under their loads; and for
his aids an injured boy and a sick girl; with one first-class weapon and
a toy among the three of them. This was all he had with which to meet
and overcome Grylls's strong and well-provided party. The odds were so
preposterous, he put the thought out of his head with a shrug. At the
last there is a moment when the hard-pressed commander must wall up his
brain; and let the tide of his blood carry him. The daylight revealed
Garth's face gaunt and sunken; his lips a grim stroke of red; and his
eyes contracted to two icy points.
As they climbed the hill Rina said: "They got fourteen horse. Nick
Grylls bring nine, three yours, and two cayuse 'Erbe't's."
At the top she halted them, while she walked her horse back and forth,
searching the grass. Garth's eyes meanwhile swept the wide, brown,
undulating sea, seeking in the hollows and the coppices for any sign of
motion. But the plain was as empty of life as the gray sky.
Rina rejoined him. "They break up so we can't see them so good," she
said in her indifferent way. "Seven horse go by the edge of the coulee,
southwest. Five horse go west. Two horse go northwest. Bam-by I t'ink
they come together."
"What horse was _she_ on?" Garth demanded.
"Nick Grylls's big roan," she answered. "They mak' a bag for her to sit
in. She sit one side; Mary Co-que-wasa sit the other."
"Find the roan's tracks," ordered Garth.
Rina shook her head. "I never follow that horse," she said.
"Find the heaviest tracks then!"
She obediently wheeled her horse; and searched the turf again; riding
around them in wide fanlike sweeps, while Garth waited with a deadly
patience. At last she struck off to the northwest, calling to them, and
Garth and Charley spurred after.
"'Erbe't, Mary and her, go this way," she said briefly, as they came up.
"Nick Grylls take six horse west, and Xavier take four by coulee."
"If we can overtake her before the others come up!" muttered Garth.
Rina, looking at their horses, shrugged significantly.
For half an hour they loped over the prairie without speech. A chill,
damp wind stung their faces. The immense and empty plain with its cold
shadows wore an ominous look under the lowering sky; a look that
clutched at the breast.
"I t'ink it snow bam-by," Rina had said.
It would need only snow to complete their difficulties. Garth ground his
teeth; and urged his horse afresh up every little rise, eagerly
searching the expanse ahead from the top. A glance at last at the
stretched nostrils and wet flanks of their mounts told him plainly such
a pace would be slowest in the end. Hardest of all to bear was the
necessity of going slowly.
"What do you know of their plans?" he demanded of Rina.
She shook her head. "They not tell me moch," she said. "They t'ink I too
friendly for you!"
Little by little as they rode, the story was drawn painfully out. "Soon
as Charley come to you, they get ready right away," said Rina. "They
catch all horses, and keep them up coulee, and pack everyt'ing. Mary
Co-que-wasa, her go down and watch your house all the time, for good
chance to tak' _her_. When you go out she mak' little fire under the
bank for signal; and Nick Grylls and 'Erbe't and Xavier, them all go
down. They not tak' me."
Garth cursed himself to think how he had played directly into their
hands.
"I wait, and bam-by they bring her back," continued Rina in her toneless
voice. "She ver' quiet. She mak' no cry. By the fire I see her face. It
is the face of a dead woman."
A groan was forced between Garth's clenched teeth. "Did they hurt her?"
he demanded, waiting for the answer like a condemned man waits for the
final stroke.
But Rina shook her head. "Nick Grylls, him tak' off his hat, polite,"
she said. "'Erbe't not say anyt'ing to her."
He breathed again. "Did they refuse to take you along?" he asked.
The stolid brown face was twisted with pain again. She lowered her head,
and clung to the horn of her saddle. "No," she said very low. "They
'fraid to leave me be'ind. But they don' want me. And I want to die when
I see 'Erbe't with _her_. They all glad when t'ink I to die!"
Garth forbore to question her further.
His impatience could scarcely brook the necessary pause to let the
horses feed at noon. It was a camp of wretchedness; none of the three
riders thought of eating. All the while the horses cropped, Garth strode
ceaselessly up and down, biting his lips; while the white-faced boy, who
had not spoken all morning, sat holding his bursting head between his
hands; and Rina, crouching apart, gazed over the prairie with unseeing
eyes.
Garth had it ever in mind to save the horses, but his impatience was
incontrollable; he made them start too soon; and throughout the
afternoon he urged them more than he knew. The animals failed visibly,
hour by hour. It was more than three hours before they came upon the
site of the noon camp of those ahead, showing that they were steadily
losing in the chase.
To be obliged to stop again two hours short of darkness was a crushing
disappointment to Garth; but the horses could go no farther. He could
never have told how he curbed his impatience throughout that age-long
night. He did not sleep: but an excess of suffering is in the end its
own merciful opiate; and he was not always fully conscious.
With the morning a fresh blow awaited them. Daylight revealed Garth's
mount lying dead of exhaustion fifty yards from camp. In a wide circle
on the neighbouring heights, the coyotes were squatting on their
haunches, waiting for the sure feast. It was colder than the day before;
and the clouds hung thicker and lower. The three of them approached the
dead animal, and looked down upon it stolidly.
Garth set his teeth, and laughed his harsh note. "I will walk," he said
shortly. "I can keep going while you are spelling the horses."
Charley, for the first time, questioned a decision of his leader. "We
can't spare an hour!" he said with a dull decisiveness, in which there
was nothing boyish. "You have got to keep on ahead. Besides, you can't
follow the tracks as well as I can, you would lose yourself. I will
walk."
Of the two desperate expedients it was clearly the better; and Garth
instantly acquiesced. Possessed by a master idea, he was incapable of
feeling any great compunctions at the idea of the injured boy setting
forth on the prairie alone--that would come later. At present he stood
equally ready to sacrifice Charley, or himself, or all three of them
together, if it would save Natalie.
The boy doggedly busied himself making a bundle of his blankets, and
food enough to last him three days. The rest of his pack was added to
the complaining backs of the other two horses.
Garth did not neglect to consider what he could do to ensure the boy's
safety. "Better return to the shack," he urged. "You can do it in two
marches. There's plenty of grub there."
But Charley flatly refused.
"Very well," said Garth. "I'll leave a note for you every time we stop,
telling you what time we passed. If you don't overtake us to-night or
to-morrow, I'll leave more grub for you. If we don't catch them in a day
or so," he added with a look at the remaining horses, "we'll all be in
the same boat again."
It was a grim, brusque leave-taking. The boy averted his head as they
left him, to hide the look of despair in his eyes. He knew what the
lowering, wintry clouds portended on the prairie; and in his heart it
was a final farewell that he bade them. But he kept his chin up, and
strode manfully after.
Garth did not suspect what was passing in his mind; the city man had
never seen a snowstorm on the prairie. Topping every rise, he looked
back, and waved his hat at the plodding figure, slightly bent under the
weight of his pack.
"He's tough! He'll come through all right!" he said to Rina more than
once--perhaps because he needed secretly to reassure himself.
Rina, preoccupied with her own heavy thoughts, did not seem to care
either way.
About ten o'clock they descended into a considerable coulee whose stony
bed still contained some standing pools. Here, by the water, Grylls's
party had encamped for the night; and the ashes of their fire were still
warm. From the extent of the trampling in the mud, it was clear the
whole party had made a rendezvous here; and beyond the coulee, even
Garth had no difficulty in following the trail of the fourteen horses
over the turf. He rode ahead now; consulting his compass, he saw that
the way always led due northwest.
Some time later his eye was attracted by a splash of white in the grass.
Throwing himself off his horse, he pounced upon it. It was a plain
little square of linen; and in the border was printed in small neat
characters "N. Bland." The find nearly unmanned him; he fancied the
scrap of linen was still damp with her tears; and the old madness of
desperation surged over him again. He forced his weary horse into a
gallop. Rina indifferently followed.
Pretty soon the snow began to fall in large, wet flakes, drifting down
as idly and erratically as the opening notes of one who dreams at the
piano--large flakes falling direct to the ground and lingering there
like measured notes; and little white coveys suddenly eddying hither and
thither, like aimless runs up and down the keyboard.
Rina lifted her brown face to the darkening sky. "We better go back to
the coulee," she called after Garth.
He frowned. "Nonsense!" he cried irritably. "A flurry of snow can't
hurt anybody! It'll turn into rain directly!"
She shrugged, and said no more.
The mute symphony of the snow was played imperceptibly accelerando. The
flakes became smaller, and thicker, and dryer; and each gust of wind was
a hint steadier and stronger than the last. Their radius of view was
little by little restricted: the distant hills faded out of sight, and
the white dome closed over and around them, until at last they seemed to
be traversing a little island of firm ground, with edges crumbling into
a misty void. Presently the ground, too, was overlaid with white; earth
and sky commingled indistinguishably; and all that held them to earth
was the quadruple line of black hoof-marks extending a little way
behind. The horses sulked and hung their heads.
They came to another and a shallower coulee, which seemed to take a
northeasterly direction across the prairie; whereas all the watercourses
they had crossed hitherto tended to the southeast. Garth, on the watch
for any such evidences, suspected they had crossed a height of land. On
the other side of this coulee he found he could no longer trace the
passage of the preceding cavalcade under the thickening snow. He
impatiently called on Rina; but she merely shrugged, refusing to look.
"No can follow in the snow!" she said contemptuously.
At every hint of stoppage, Garth's blood surged dangerously upward. He
pressed his knuckles against his temples, and strove to think. The two
horses, instinctively drawing close together, turned their tails to the
driving flakes. Rina sat hunched in her saddle, as indifferent as a
squat, clay image.
"I will ride on," he said thickly.
She gave no sign.
He consulted his compass. "We have ridden due northwest all the way," he
said. "Where are they heading for?"
"Death River, I guess," she answered, pointing. "The crossing is
northwest."
"How far?" he demanded.
"Two days' journey, maybe seventy-five miles."
"You wait for the boy in the shelter of the poplar bluff across the
coulee," he said. "When the snow stops, follow on as well as you can."
"Charley not come any more," said Rina in a tone of quiet fatalism.
"When snow hide our track, he walk round and round. Bam-by he fall down,
and not get up. He die. He know that."
Garth, ready to push into the storm, reined up again. Her sureness
chilled his impatient hurry; and the oft-told tragedies of prairie
snowstorms recurred to him.
"Die in the snow!" he repeated dully, hanging in agonizing indecision
between the two images; Natalie ahead, and the solitary boy plodding
behind. On the one hand he thought: "The storm has held them up,
somewhere just ahead! It is my only chance of overtaking them!" and then
he turned his horse's head north. But the other thought would not down.
"The kid knew it meant death to walk; and he chose it!" Garth finally
led the way back over the coulee.
Rina had no difficulty making herself comfortable among the young poplar
trees. She improvised a shelter out of a blanket stretched over two
inclined saplings; and in front of it she built a fire. Garth meanwhile
changed to the fresher horse, and started back over their own dimming
trail.
"You never find him now," Rina said hopelessly, as he left her.
Garth merely set his jaw.
His watch told him it was past eleven. He calculated they had covered
five miles between the two coulees, and that it would be about
twenty-five miles all told back to their own camping-place. Supposing
the boy to have averaged three miles an hour, he would now be some
twelve miles away, and if he kept walking, Garth, at his present pace,
should come upon him in an hour and a half's riding.
The marks of their previous passage were soon completely obliterated;
and thereafter Garth rode compass in hand. With the wind behind, his
horse showed a better stomach for travelling; and he made the first
coulee in something under an hour. Here a little search revealed the
half-burned logs of Grylls's fire under the snow; and this put him
directly in the path again. He stood up the logs, to make a better mark
against his return.
He began to keep a sharp lookout for the boy, frequently shouting his
name. His voice, muffled by the thickly falling flakes, had an odd,
deadened ring in his own ears; and he doubted if he could be heard very
far. When he considered the vast width of the prairie, and the extreme
improbability of two figures, shaping opposite courses, meeting
point-blank in the middle of it, he was ready to despair of finding the
boy. It maddened him to think how close they might pass, without either
being aware.
Later, he adopted another expedient. Every fifteen minutes he turned his
horse at right angles to his course, and galloping far to the right and
left searched the snow for human tracks; then, picking up his trail
where he left it, he would push a little farther ahead. In this way he
could sweep a path about a mile wide on the prairie.
But the hours passed, and the snow deepened, and there was neither sight
nor sound of the boy. Garth was not sparing of his bitter self-reproaches
then, for having abandoned him. It seemed to poor Garth in his
hopelessness, as if his whole course through the country had been
marked by a series of hideous blunders.
Less than three hours of daylight now remained to him, and he was all
of ten miles from his own base. He dared not push farther away, for,
little as he regarded himself, he could take no risks while Natalie's
fate still hung in the balance. But before giving up, he determined
to make one last sortie back and forth across the prairie. Far to the
right, just as hope was expiring, he saw, crossing the white expanse, a
crooked, double row of slight depressions, like little moulds, slowly
filling with powdery snow.
Flinging himself off his horse, with a beating heart, he hastily scooped
out the snow. A man's footprint was clearly revealed. With a shout,
he mounted again and jerked his horse's head around. The weary animal
balked flatly at facing the storm, but Garth, beside himself, lashed him
until he plunged into it. The tracks momentarily grew plainer. While
they had strayed far to the left of his own course, he wondered to see
that they still held the right direction in the main.
He redoubled his shouting. At last a muffled, indistinguishable sound
answered him from ahead; and presently out of the wild whirl of flakes,
a spectral figure was slowly resolved--as poignant a symbol of humanity
as the last man on earth.
"Charley! Charley!" shouted Garth.
The figure turned uncertainly. Under the snow-laden lashes the eyes were
vague.
Garth slipped out of the saddle; and, throwing his arm about the boy's
shoulders, caught him to his breast. "Thank God! I was in time!" he
cried in a great voice.
"It's really you!" the boy murmured. "I thought I was hearing things."
Garth clapped him between the shoulders. "Buck up, my hearty!" he cried.
"It's all right now!"
"Have you got Natalie?" the boy said quickly.
Garth sadly shook his head.
"You shouldn't have come back then," he said dully. "I didn't expect
it!"
Garth hugged him anew. "Dear lad!" he cried with a break in his voice.
"I couldn't let you die in the snow!"
The kindness brought fuller consciousness back to the boy's eyes. He
clung to Garth then; and lowered his head; and whimpered a little. After
all he was only seventeen.
Garth hoisted him to the saddle; and headed into the storm again. The
horse balked continually, sorely trying his patience. Their progress was
very slow. Garth sought to keep Charley up with cheerful speech.
"Bully for you to keep going!" he cried.
"It was because--Natalie might need me," the boy's voice trailed.
"And right on the course!" Garth sang. "How did you keep it?"
"When the snow hid your tracks--I remembered--to keep the wind on my
right cheek," he murmured.
That was the last Garth could get out of him. He was presently alarmed
to find the boy growing increasingly numb and drowsy; even he knew what
this portended in the North. He pulled him out of the saddle; and made
him walk; supporting him with one arm, while with the other he led the
horse. The animal took advantage of his partial helplessness, to plant
his legs and pull back anew. If there was ever an excuse for anger
against a dumb beast, surely hard-pressed Garth had it then. The horse
was crazed with exhaustion, and terror of the storm; and tugs and kicks
were of no avail. Garth could not bring in both boy and horse by main
strength; and in the end, with hearty curses, he was obliged to abandon
the beast to his fate.
Garth, pulling his hat over his eyes, and drawing the boy's arm across
his shoulders, doggedly pushed into the storm. He thus half supported,
half dragged his companion, who was, nevertheless, compelled to use his
own legs. Charley never spoke except now and then to beg drowsily to be
let alone. In Garth's flask was about a gill of precious stimulant, and,
when the boy's legs failed him, he doled it out in sips.
They had at least nine miles to cover--and only two hours of daylight
left. Try as he would to banish it, the sense of nine miles' distance
would roll itself interminably out before Garth's mind's eye. Nine miles
into two hours--the sum had no answer. Afterward night and storm on the
empty prairie--what was the use? But when he reached this point, he
would grit his teeth and take a fresh hold of the boy. If he had any
other defined thought besides this painful round, it was to thank God
that he was strong; he needed every ounce of it now.
Instead of attempting to pick up his own trail--surely obscured by now
in the snow--he shaped his course northwest, trusting to strike the
coulee at its nearest point, and travel down until he hit the mark he
had set up. It was a little longer so; but the result justified it, for
there was some shelter in the coulee; and working down the bottom, they
could not miss the mark.
It was half-past four by Garth's watch when they laboriously climbed up
the other side; and set their course by compass again for Rina's camp.
It grew colder hourly; and the snowflakes became as hard and sharp as
grains of coarse powder. Charley was kept going automatically by
frequent small doses of the spirit from the flask. Garth dared not spare
any of it for himself. It soon began to grow dark; and long before Garth
could hope they had nearly covered the distance between the two coulees,
it became totally dark; and he could no longer read the face of his
compass. Fortunately the wind held steady from the north; he struggled
ahead, keeping it on his right cheek as Charley had done before him.
Garth's head became confused; he was no longer sensible of the passage
of time. Only his will kept his legs at their work. Drowsiness crept
over him; and with it a growing sense of the uselessness of struggling
further. He fought it for a while, but with subsiding energy. His knees
began to weaken under him; he sank down. With a desperate effort, he
struggled up again; and won another painful hundred yards. He was
falling again--and this time he did not care--when suddenly the ground
fell away from under his feet, he pitched forward, and he and the boy
rolled down a steep declivity together.
Garth instantly knew they had reached the second coulee; and the thought
cleared his fogged senses like the draught from his flask which he could
not spare himself. He poured the last drops between Charley's numb lips;
and turned to the right over the stony bed of the watercourse. He
remembered Charley had strayed far to the left of his true course when
guiding himself by the wind; and he had also observed in himself a
tendency to swerve to that side, when working by compass. So he was sure
they were somewhere above the poplar bluff--how far he dared not guess.
He was right. Utterly worn out by a seeming interminable struggle
through the drifts in the bottom of the coulee, at last a misty, pinkish
aura blushed in the snowy night. It was Rina's fire--warmth and shelter!
and before it a little animal was roasting on a spit. Garth's senses
slipped away in rapture at the smell it sent forth.