FOR a moment the young man gazed in a stupid hope that the impossible
would happen,--that horses, wagon, man, and woman would emerge and
continue their mad flight down the canon. Then, so completely and
suddenly had all this life and activity Ceased, he wondered if the old
anguish that had driven him to the solitude of the mountains was now
tricking an abnormal imagination and weaving phantasms out of the
storm, to torture him a moment with breathless dread, and then suppress
themselves in the seeming of a tragic death. He remembered the warnings
of Dr. Malbone,--he must close his mind upon the past, must find in the
present only the light with which the world is filled, and must aim for
a sane and useful future.
All this consumed but a moment. At once there burst upon him the awful
reality of the tragedy that had worked itself out so logically before
him. Humanity cried aloud within him. He sprang toward his hut, procured
an axe, and plunged down the slope of the talus, taking no heed of the
crude but surer trail that he had made from the road to his hut. He
slipped, fell, gathered himself up, fell again, but rapidly neared his
goal.
He paused when he had reached the prostrate tree. Through the branches
his peering revealed a crushed, still heap. He pushed his head and
shoulders within and called. There was no response.
He was at the rear of the wagon, and soon saw that it had been crushed
into an indeterminate mass of wood and iron. By pushing apart the more
yielding branches he brought to view the up-turned face of the man,
whose eyes, fixed in death, stared horribly from a head curiously and
grotesquely unshaped by the crush of the branches. The young man drew
back. He gasped for breath; he called upon his self-command to bear him
up in this strenuous time. He attacked the branches with his axe and
cleared them away. He half wondered that the eyes of the dead remained
open while they filled with particles of the bark riven by the axe.
Presently the body came within reach. With unspeakable repulsion the
young man placed his hand upon the stranger’s chest. There was no sign
of life. Indeed, he wondered that he had taken any trouble to ascertain
what he already knew.
All this time the young man’s dread and terror, heightened by a sense of
utter loneliness in the presence of the dead, had driven the woman from
his mind. He had not yet seen the slightest trace of her. Did he have
the strength to behold a woman mangled as he had found the man... Still,
they should have decent interment; that was his duty as a man. And
further, it was necessary that their identity be ascertained, in order
that their friends might be informed.
There was something else. Far back in the mountains, that wilder
wilderness of the Trinity range, and in the Siskiyou range, beyond
them, there were huge gray wolves, fierce and formidable. Now and then
a daring hunter had come out of those mountains with the skin of a great
gray wolf. There were old stories in the mountains that when the snow
had been deep and of prolonged duration, the gray wolves came down to
the tamer reaches inhabited by men, driven thither by hunger, for the
game upon which they subsisted had fled before the snow to find herbage.
The first to come out had been deer; soon after them had come the
wolves. As the deer fell before the rifles of the settlers, the wolves
had been driven to depredations on cattle and horses. There were ugly
tales, too, of men attacked by them. Out of all this had grown the
legend of a she-wolf that bore away children to her wolf-pack.
After the wind now raging in the mountains would come the snow, silent,
deep, and implacable, to hide the work of the fallen tree below the
hut; but would it hide everything so well that the great gray wolves,
if driven by hunger from the remoter mountains, would fail to find what
hunger required them to seek?
Wilder again attacked the tree with his axe,--another one lay dead
there, and she must be found; and there was heavy and horrifying work
ahead before the wind should cease and the snow begin to fall. At
first the young man resumed his attack with the furious energy that had
hitherto sustained his effort; but wisdom and caution came now to
his aid. He realized his feebleness of mind, spirit, and body. He had
devoted weeks of arduous work to the construction of his hut, and that
had lent a certain strength to his muscles and buoyancy to his soul.
Still, he was hardly more than a shadow of his old self, before his life
had been wrecked a year ago, and he had come into the mountains to make
a sturdy fight for self-mastery, for the regeneration of whatever shreds
of manhood were left within him, and for their patching and binding into
a fabric that should take its place in the ranks of men and work out a
man’s destiny.
He went about his task with greater deliberation. He forced himself to
regard with calmness the distorted dead face upturned toward him. He
worked with that slowness which makes greater haste in achievement. This
brought a surer judgment and an economy of effort and time. He cut the
branches one by one and dragged them away.
Soon the woman’s form appeared. In the extreme moment of the catastrophe
she had evidently sprung forward; this had brought her body, face
downward, between the horses; they, in being crushed under the trunk
of the tree, fallen across them, had nevertheless given her a certain
protection; the trunk, in breaking the backs of the horses, had missed
her head. As for the rest, she was so closely wedged between the horses
that it would be difficult to extricate her.
This, however, was finally accomplished after great labor. The woman’s
face and clothing were blood-stained. So much worse did she look than
the man, that Wilder had a new struggle with himself to command courage
and strength for the task. He dragged her out to a clear place in the
road, and made the same perfunctory examination as in the case of
the man. While he was doing so the woman moved and gasped, and this
unexpected indication of life was the greatest shock of the tragedy.
But it was one of those shocks which bring new life and strength.
Whereas, before he had been facing, without daring to contemplate, the
awful duty that he owed the dead, here now was the most precious thing
that the world then could have offered him,--here was Life, human life,
fleeting, perhaps, but infinitely precious.
Wilder knelt beside the unconscious woman and with eager hands loosened
her clothing. He ran to the river, dipped his handkerchief in the water,
bathed her face, and removed some of the blood that covered it. He
chafed her hands and wrists, anxiously watching for the slightest
change. This came rapidly and progressed steadily. Removed from the
crushing pressure of the horses, her chest found its natural expansion,
and the rhythm of deep, slow breathing was established. Wilder had
learned numerous elementary things from Dr. Malbone; he saw that,
although the sufferer was so grievously hurt as to be unconscious, life
was yet strong within her.
Time, then, was the precious element here. The sufferer must be taken
at once to the hut, and Dr. Malbone summoned. As for the dead man, there
was no present danger on his account, and the living demanded first
attention.
A formidable task now confronted the young man. First, he had to bear
the unconscious woman up the steep trail to the hut; then he should
have to go many miles afoot to summon Dr. Malbone. The young man thought
nothing of the difficulties, but all of the doing.
He was about to assail the task of getting the woman upon his shoulder,
when it occurred to him that her injuries might possibly be aggravated
by his manner of carrying her. He thereupon made a hasty examination.
The head was bleeding. The face bore no visible injuries. The bones of
the arms were whole. The left leg, however, was broken above the knee.
What the particular cause of the sufferer’s unconsciousness was he could
only guess. Perhaps it was merely a condition of temporary congestion,
produced by the fearful pressure to which she had been subjected between
the horses. A bleeding at the ears and nose seemed to the young man a
bad sign.
Her condition having been thus approximately ascertained, the next
problem was to bear her to the hut in a way that should do the least
harm to her injuries. The first necessary thing to be done, therefore,
was to prevent any mobility in the region of the fracture. To this end
he burrowed again into the débris and brought forth some boards that
had served as the bottom of the wagon. Tearing strips from the woman’s
clothing, he bound the boards to her in a way to protect her from harm
in moving her.
The strain upon his attentiveness sharpened and strengthened him in
every way. He formed the whole plan of his bearing her to the hut,
making her temporarily comfortable, summoning Dr. Malbone, and attending
to the details of nursing her back to health.
To lift her gently upon a bowlder; to bend forward and adjust her
upon his back with infinite care; to proceed with her up the laborious
ascent,--all this was skilfully and expeditiously done.
Serious difficulties began soon to embarrass him. He discovered that
she was above the average height and weight of women, heavier than he,
although he was the taller. He found that the numerous abrupt steps in
the trail laid a heavy tax upon his strength, and that some steep places
proved slippery under the burden that he bore. In addition, the muscles
of his arms strained and cramped; and long before he had reached the
shelf upon which his hut was perched he fell to his knees a number of
times from exhaustion. But the end came at last when he staggered into
his hut, dragged a cover from his bed to the floor, and gently laid his
burden upon it.