DEEP TRAILS
They put a mile and a half between that fire and the next. Vane was no longer weakening. He was strengthening in heart, muscles and spirit gradually but steadily, despite the drag of the snow on his legs and a decided sense of neglect under his belt. He was working back to the pink of condition, throwing off at every forward step something of the effects of his difficult journey with the Danglers. He was recovering by those very efforts which his enemies had reckoned on to work his undoing. But the young woman was tiring. It was Vane who gathered fuel and cleared away the snow and built the third fire. They rested there for twenty minutes, seated close together. She snuggled her head against his shoulder and slept a little.
The snowfall had ceased by that time, the close gray blanket of cloud had thinned everywhere, had been lifted from the horizon at one corner, and now a desolate and subdued illumination seeped across the white and black world. The air, still motionless, was now dry and bitterly cold.
During the third stage of their homeward journey, Joe dragged her snowshoes heavily, and her pulls on Vane’s hands became feebler at every drift. She was sleepy, bone-tired and weak with hunger. Backwoods girl though she was, she was not seasoned to hardship as was her companion. But she continued to recognize the landmarks of the right way.
Their halts and little fires fell more and more frequently and closer and closer together. At last a bitter lash of wind struck and sent a thin wisp of snow glinting and running like spray. They came upon a narrow wood road well beaten by hoofs and bob-sled shoes beneath the four-inch skim of new snow.
“Which way?” asked Vane.
She pointed. “Straight to Larry Dent’s place,” she said.
Then he removed her webs, crouched and hitched her up on his back. She made no protest. “This is how I save your life,” she said, and instantly closed her eyes in sleep. Her arms were about his neck. They clung tight even in her sleep. Her cheek was against his ear. He staggered several times, but he hadn’t far to go. As he reached the kitchen door—the only door—of Larry Dent’s little gray habitation, an icy wind swooped down from the shuddering treetops and filled the whole world with a white suffocation of snow. He pushed open the door, staggered across the threshold, and stumbled to his knees at the large feet of the dumbfounded Mrs. Dent, with his precious burden still secure and asleep on his back.
“See what’s blew in,” said Larry, who was seated beside the stove smoking his pipe. “Shet the door,” he added.
Joe awoke and slipped from Vane’s shoulders. Vane remained on hands and knees, breathing deep. Mrs. Dent pulled herself together, went over, and shut the door against the flying drift. Larry shook the ashes from his pipe, and said. “Glad to see you, Miss Hinch; an’ also yer friend—or is he a hoss?”
Then Joe began to laugh and cry; and, still laughing and crying, she ran to Vane and helped him into a rocking chair, and kissed him again and again right there in front of the Dents.
Having left the stranger in the hut with the broken roof, bruised and unconscious and fatigued, without food or water or blankets or matches or snowshoes, in complete ignorance of the one right way of a hundred wrong ones of escape from that place, Henry Dangler and his big son Steve made straight for Forkville. The snow blotted out their tracks behind them. They visited half a dozen places in the village, including two stores, the forge and the hotel, and were puzzled to encounter only women and children. They asked where the men had gone to, and were puzzled by the answers of the women and children.
“There’s somethin’ wrong,” said Hen.
“It sure looks like it,” agreed Steve. “That dang old Hassock woman had a mean slant to her eye.”
They headed for the settlement on Goose Creek with a growing uneasiness in their tough breasts. They took the road, for it was the shortest way. The new snow had filled up the tracks of the sleds and also of the pung in which young McPhee had brought the constable. They hadn’t gone far before they were startled by a jangle of silvery bells close behind them, sounding suddenly out of the muffling now. They leapt aside into the underbrush and crouched and turned. They saw a large man, white as wool, slip by in a pung behind a long-gaited nag. He was there and past in a dozen seconds. He had sat hunched forward as if bowed by the weight of snow on him. He had not looked to the right or the left.
“The deputy sheriff,” whispered Henry to his son.
“Hell!” whispered Steve.
“Guess we were too late.”
“Guess so. What’ll we do now?”
“Reckon I’ll go along an’ see what’s happened. Maybe the old man will trick ’em yet.”
“You best come back with me, pa. I jist thought of somethin’ that’ll maybe work out all right.”
“Back where to? What you thought of, Steve?”
“Back to where we left that feller, an’ save his blasted life! He ain’t seen us, nor heard our voices. He don’t know who beaned ’im and drug ’im around. Let’s go back an’ save his damn life and git in right with him.”
“No use, Steve! He’d be lost an’ froze dead before we could git there—even if we could find him. He’s the kind will bust right out of the hut the minute he gits his wits back—right out into the storm on his busted rackets—an’ git to runnin’ around in a circle inside ten minutes. That’s his kind. Mind how he jumped us, an’ him tied an’ blindfolded? A fightin’ fool! When he sticks in a drift he’ll tear the woods to pieces—an’ himself. We’d be too late, Steve. Reckon we best forgit all about that business. Reckon we’re in for trouble enough without goin’ back an’ foolin’ around that section of the woods.”
“I guess he won’t—I guess he’s tougher’n you figger on. I’m goin’ back, anyhow.”
So Steve headed back for the hut with the broken roof by the shortest way through the blinding curtains of moist snow. Steve was a smart woodsman under normal conditions—but now the conditions were not normal. Never before had he traveled far in so thick a fall of snow. Never before had he undertaken a journey alone with panic in his heart and doubt in his mind. He had gone a mile before being conscious of the panic and the doubt. After that, they grew with devilish rapidity.
Steve didn’t find the hut wherein he and his father had left the stranger. He didn’t come within miles of it. At last the snow ceased to fall; and soon after that—or was it an hour after?—he came upon a hole in the snow and the ashes and black sticks of a spent fire in the bottom of the hole. The ashes were still warm. These things puzzled and frightened him. He gave up all thought of finding the hut. He walked for a long time, walked meaningless miles, beneath a clearing sky, looking for familiar landmarks. Suddenly a bitter wind swooped down and filled earth and sky with flying snow.
Mrs. Dent put Joe to bed. The girl fell into a deep sleep—but she woke up a little later for long enough to drink and eat from a bountiful tray and answer a few of Mrs. Dent’s eager and illuminating questions. Robert Vane took a few snatches of sleep in the rocking chair, and talked and smoked and drank tea between naps. He answered questions as they came, without thought or care. He felt fine. He loved the whole world, but this part of it more than the rest of it. And when supper was ready he pulled his chair up to the table, and drank coffee as if he had never heard of tea, and ate buckwheat pancakes and fried pork and hot biscuits and doughtnuts and Washington pie. There was nothing the matter with Robert Vane. Everything was right with him.
The wind swished around the corners of the little house, harsh and heavy with its burdens of dry snow. It slashed the roof and lashed the blinded windows and shouldered the door. It whistled in the chimney and under the eaves; and from the surrounding forest came the muffled roar of it like surf along a reef.
“Hark!” exclaimed Mrs. Dent. “What was that?”
“The wind,” said Larry. “Did you expect a brass band?”
The old dog got onto his feet and cocked an ear.
“Rover heard it. There it is again! Hark! Like someone yellin’.”
Larry went to the door and pulled it open. Wind and snow leapt in, the fire roared in the stove, the flame of the lamp jumped high and vanished and the old dog cowered back under the table and howled.
“Shut that door!” screamed Mrs. Dent; and Larry shut it.
Vane struck a match, and lit the lamp.
“I didn’t hear anything but the wind,” he said.
“I guess that’s what it was, all right—but it sure did sound like someone hollerin’, once or twice,” said the woman.