IN THE BLIZZARD
The McClintocks decided after all not to put in a freight outfit to Piodie. The Dodsons beat them to it by putting in a large number of wagons as adjuncts to the stages they ran from Carson.
From Hugh’s partners word came at intervals of the progress made in sinking the shaft of the Ground Hog, which was the name they had given the mine. These messages reflected Budd’s enthusiasm. The postscript of each of them, whether it came in the form of a letter or a word-of-mouth greeting, was to the effect that he expected to strike the ledge now at any time.
He wrote in one note:
Bald Knob is sure looking up. Ralph Dodson has done made some locations above us, and two lads from American Flat of the name of Jenson have staked out a claim just below us down the hill. They’re running a tunnel in from the hillside. Well, Kid, look out for news of a big strike soon. We’re sure right close to the vein, looks like.
Hugh smiled when he read it. Budd had been on the verge of a discovery so many times that his non-resident partner discounted the prophecy. There was no use in building up hopes that would probably never be realized.
In another letter the fat man mentioned a second piece of news. “Our schoolmarm here, Miss Victoria Lowell, has begun scratching dirt right lively on that claim you staked out for her. She has got a Swede on the job, but she has been out ’most every Saturday to see how tricks are. I notice Ralph Dodson has been mighty attentive to her. You better drift over, Kid, and do your assessment work on that claim if you aim to get it patented in your name. Me, if I was a high-stepping colt like you, I’ll be doggoned if I’d let that smooth guy Dodson jump as rich a prospect as the Little Schoolmarm.”
This time Hugh did not smile. Budd, of course, was on the wrong track. He had leaped to the conclusion that Hugh was in love with the girl because he had staked a claim for her, and in his blunt blundering way he was giving his friend a tip. McClintock was troubled. He profoundly distrusted Ralph Dodson, had disliked him from the first moment when their eyes met. The fellow was a ravening wolf if he had ever seen one. But he was handsome, well-dressed, the kind of man who is like wildfire among women. He probably knew how to make love amazingly well.
And Vicky—impetuous, imperious little Vicky of the brave heart and generous instincts—was just the girl to yield to the glamour of his charm. He could see now her flashing face, finely cut like a rare brilliant, full of fire and high lights. She had better be dead than the wife of Ralph Dodson.
The thing worried him. It would not let him alone. At work and in his leisure hours he thought of the girl with keen-edged anxiety. His imagination began to play him tricks. At dusk, as he walked to his room, he would see her filmily in front of him, moving like sweet music toward the open arms of Dodson. Once she turned and gave Hugh her cryptic, tantalizing smile.
Someone ought to interfere to save the girl from an event so ruinous. He thought of telling Scot, but after all he had nothing better to go on than the gossip of old Jim Budd.
On swift impulse he decided to go to Piodie himself. It would not do any harm, anyhow, to have a look at the Ground Hog and see how it was developing. While he was there maybe he could drop a casual hint to Vicky. Perhaps he would discover that Budd’s warning was all moonshine.
Winter was white on the hills when Hugh started over the Geiger Grade to Reno by stage. At Reno he found traffic tied up. The snow in the valleys was deep and it drifted with the wind so fast that the cuts filled up and prevented the stage from getting through. Hugh learned that a pack train had broken trail the day before and had reached Stampede Notch in safety. From there it was working across the divide to Piodie.
He bought a pair of snowshoes and set out on the long trip. The day was warm and the snow soft. This made travel difficult, and McClintock made slow progress until he was out of the Truckee Meadows. By afternoon he was in the hills. The wind was whistling in gusts, sometimes wrathfully, again in a plaintive whine. It was colder now and the snow less slushy. In spite of fatigue he covered the miles faster than he had been able to do in the valley.
Many times he glanced at the sky uneasily. It was heavy with dun clouds, and unless he missed his guess snow would fall soon and in quantity.
Came dusk, and after dusk darkness. Hugh kept going. He was an old-timer and could tell his direction by the wind, the dip of the land, and the slope of the snow waves.
It was nearly midnight when he knocked at the door of a Mormon ranch house and asked shelter for the night. Healthily fatigued in every muscle, he slept like a schoolboy almost round the clock.
Before he took the road again it was noon. At intervals during the night snow had fallen, but just now the storm had died down.
“Better stay another night,” the rancher advised. “Gettin’ her back up for a blizzard, looks like.”
The taste of the air and the look of the sky backed his prophecy. There was going to be more snow and a lot of it. Very likely there would be snow and wind together. But Hugh did not want to be tied up for several days in the hills. He decided to make a dash for Piodie. The town was not more than twenty-five miles away. If his luck held he would be in by supper time.
He had covered half the distance before the storm hit him hard. It began with wind, heavy sweeping gusts of it driving over the hills and into the ravines. Presently snow came, a hard sleet that pelted his face like ground glass. The temperature was falling fast. Hugh set his teeth and ploughed forward, putting his head down into the blizzard as a football player does when he is bucking the line.
Young and warm-blooded though he was, the chill of the tempest bit to his bones and sapped his vitality. The wind and the fine sleet were like a wall that pressed closely and savagely on him. Now and again he raised his head and took the full fury of the leaping storm to make sure that he was still on the trail.
Far and near became relative words. The end of the world, as far as he could tell, was almost within reach of his outstretched hand. The whistle of the shrieking wind was so furious that it deadened all sounds, even itself. The sleety snow was a silent stinging foe that flogged him mile after mile as he wallowed on.
The afternoon had been dark, but an added murkiness told him that night was at hand. He was nearly exhausted, and in the darkness, with the raging blizzard all about him, he felt that directions would become confused. He must be close to town now, but if he should get lost, a quarter of a mile would be as far away as Carson.
And presently he knew that he was lost. He was staggering through the deep snow on a hillside. Somehow he had got off the trail and it was swallowed up in the bleak night. He had an extraordinary store of strength, vitality, and courage. But it was not in human endurance to stand up under the flailing of the wind and sleet that pelted him, to keep going through the heavy drifts that had been swept into every hollow and draw. The bitter cold penetrated closer to his heart. An overpowering desire to lie down and sleep tugged at his will.
Not for a moment did he give up. One of his snowshoes was lost in a snow bank. He kicked off the other. Now on his hands and knees, now on his feet, weaving forward like a drunken man, all sense of direction gone, he still plunged into the howling waste of desolation that hemmed him in.
He followed the path of least resistance. It took him down hill into a draw. His stumbling steps zigzagged toward a lower level and he followed the arroyo to its mouth. A slight dip in the ground swung him to the right.
His boots were clogged with snow. The muscles of his thighs were so weary that each time he dragged a leg out of the drifts it felt as though weighted with a cannon ball. There were times when he could make ground only by throwing his body forward and beating down the white bank that obstructed the way. Still he crawled on, an indomitable atom of fighting humanity in a great frozen desert of death.
A groping hand struck something solid. The stiff fingers of the hand searched the surface of the barrier. Hugh’s heart renewed hope. He had come up against a pile of corded wood. It was cut in short lengths to fit a stove. The chances were that somewhere within fifty feet of him was a house.
But where? In what direction? The fury of the storm filled the night, made it opaque as a wall. He could not see five feet in front of him. The landmark that he had found he dared not leave, for if he wandered from it the chances were that he would never find it again. It would be of no use to shout. The shrieking wind would drown a voice instantly. Yet he did call out, again and again.
The thing he did was born of the necessity of the situation. He dug aside the snow from the top of the pile and with a loose piece of wood hammered free others from the niche into which they were frozen. How he did this he could never afterwards tell, for his muscles were so paralyzed from cold that they would scarcely answer the call his will made on them.
Then, hard and straight, he flung a stick out into the storm. His reserves of strength were nearly gone, but he held himself to the job before him. One after another he threw the pieces of firewood, following a definite plan as to direction, in such a way as to make the place where he stood the centre of a circle. His hope was to strike the house. If he could do this, and if the door happened to be on the side of the house nearest him, then the light of the lamp would perhaps penetrate into the storm so that he could see it.
He knew it was a gamble with all the odds against him. He was backing a series of contingencies each one of which must turn in his favour if he was to win.
He collapsed on the woodpile at last from sheer physical exhaustion. For a few moments he lay there, helpless, drifting toward that sleep from which he would never awake in this world. But the will to live still struggled feebly. He was of that iron breed which has won the West for civilization against untold odds. It was not in him to give up as long as he could force his tortured body forward.
Even now he did not forget the craft of the frontiersman which reads signs and makes deductions from them. The corded wood was two lengths deep. Near one end there was a sag in it two or three feet deep. This depression was greater on the side next Hugh. He reasoned that it is human nature to choose the easiest way. The people who lived in the house would use first that part of the wood which was nearest. Therefore it followed that the house must be on the same side of the corded pine as he was, and it must be closest to the place from which the wood had been carried to the kitchen stove.
He struck out at a right angle from the pile. Before he had gone three steps he stumbled and fell. His prostration was so complete that he could not at once get to his feet again. He lay inert for a time, then crawled up again and lurched forward. A second time his knees buckled under him. As he fell, an outstretched hand hit the wall of the house.
Weakly he felt his way along the wall till he came to a door. His hand fumbled with the latch, but his frozen fingers could not work the catch. He beat on the door.
It opened unexpectedly, and he plunged forward to the floor of the cabin. He saw, as though a long way off, the faces of devils and of angels lit by high lights. His body lost weight, and he floated into space luxuriously. Pain and fatigue, devils and angels, all were blotted out.