The Rim of the Desert

by Ada Woodruff Anderson

"The setter, content with my company, ran ahead, and I followed him across the ice-bridge. The pocket was thickly strewn with broken rock, but at the upper end there was a clear space grown with heather. And it was there, as I feared, between a bluff and a solitary thumb-shaped boulder that the dog had found his master."

Tisdale paused, looking off again with clouding brows to the stormy heights. Eastward the moon in a clear sky threw a soft illumination on the desert. The cry of the cougar had ceased. The electrical display was less brilliant; it seemed farther off. Miss Armitage moved a little and waited, watching his face.

"But of course," she ventured at last, "you mixed another draught from your emergency flask. The stimulant saved his life."

"No." Tisdale's glance came slowly back. "He was beyond any help. A square of canvas was set obliquely on the glacier side, and that and the blanket which covered him proved the place was his camp; but the only traces of food were a few cracker or bread crumbs in a trap made of twigs, and a marmot skin and a bunch of ptarmigan feathers to show the primitive contrivance had worked. There was no wood in the neighborhood, but the ashes of a small fire showed he must have carried fuel from the belt of spruce half-way down the gorge. If he had made such a trip and not gone on to the cabin, it clearly proved his mental condition. Still in the end there had been a glimmer of light, for he had torn a leaf from his notebook and written first his wife's name and then a line, out of which I was only able to pick the words 'give' and 'help' and 'States.' Evidently he had tried to put the paper into his poke, which had dropped, untied, from his hand with the pencil he had used. The sack was nearly full; it had fallen upright in a fold of the blanket, so only a little of the gold, which was very coarse and rough and bright, had spilled. I made all this inventory almost at a glance, and saw directly he had left his pan and shovel in the gravels of a stream that cascaded over the wall and through the pocket to join the creek below the glacier. Then it came over me that I must keep the truth from her until she was safely back at the cabin, and I put the poke in my pocket and hurried to do what I could.

"The setter hampered me and was frantic when I turned away, alternately following me a few yards, whining and begging, and rushing back to his master. Finally he stopped on the farther side of the ice-bridge and set up a prolonged cry. His mistress had come to meet me and she waited at the crossing, supporting herself with her hands on a great boulder, shoulders forward, breath hushed, watching me with her soul in her eyes. At last I reached her. 'Madam,' I began, but the words caught in my throat. I turned and looked up at the splendor on the mountain. The air drew sharp across the ice, but a sudden heat swept me; I was wet with perspiration from head to foot. 'Madam,' and I forced myself to meet her eyes, 'it is just as I expected; the dog found—nothing.'

"She straightened herself slowly, still watching me, then suddenly threw her arms against the rock and dropped her face. 'Come,' I said, 'we must start back. Come, I want to hurry through to my camp for a horse.'

"This promise was all she needed to call up her supreme self-control, and she lifted her face with a smile that cut me worse than any tears. 'I'm not ungrateful,' she said, 'but—I felt so sure, from the first, you would find him.'

"'And you felt right,' I hurried to answer. 'Trust me to bring him through.'

"I whistled the setter, and she called repeatedly, but he refused to follow. When we started down the trail, he watched us from his post at the farther end of the ice-bridge, whining and baying, and the moment she stopped at the first turn to look back, he streaked off once more for that pocket. 'Never mind,' I said, and helped her over a rough place, 'Jerry knows he is a good traveler. He will be home before you.' But it was plain to me he would not, and try as I might to hurry her out of range of his cry, it belled again soon, and the cliffs caught it over and over and passed it on to us far down the gorge."

There was one of those speaking silences in which the great heart of the man found expression, and the woman beside him, following his gaze, sifted the cloudy Pass. She seemed in that moment to see that other canyon, stretching down from the glacier, and those two skirting the edge of cliffs, treading broken stairs, pursued by the cry of the setter into the gathering gloom of the Arctic night.