He was quiet for a long time after this effort, but at last spoke again.
“You have made me very comfortable,” he said. “You have done everything possible. Now it is time for you to go.”
“Go?” echoed Nancy. “Why must we go?”
His eyes were looking beyond her at the threatening sky, and that ominous, deeping color of the range opposite. Only one peak, the highest, stood shining above the others, still bathed in fitful sunshine; but in a moment the enveloping shadow had crawled up the slope and quenched its brilliance at last.
John Herrick spoke again, more insistently.
“At the very best it makes me shudder to have you two go down that trail alone, and you must do it while the light is good and there is nothing to hurry you.” He struggled to raise himself on his elbow and added sharply, “You are not to delay. You can send some one back to find me.”
Nancy got up obediently and went to stand before the tent. The two horses were lingering near the fire: she caught their bridles and waited. It was her elder sister who must decide what they were to do.
A long bank of cloud, seething, boiling, dark below but white at its upper edge, like surf breaking on a reef, was rolling over the summit of the rugged height opposite. The slow roar of the rising wind could be heard stirring the tree-tops in the forest below. Seeing Beatrice hesitate at the door of the tent, John Herrick broke forth with the desperate truth.
“There is snow coming. An hour of it will make the trail impassable for you. It will be cold as midwinter before night, and dark long before then. There is not a minute for you to lose. Beatrice, my dear, my dear, what does anything matter if harm comes to you and your sister? Go! Go!”
A breath of wind touched Beatrice for a second and was gone, yet its icy chill cut her to the very bone. Through the comparative warmth of the air about them it had appeared and vanished like the dread ghost of that bitter cold, reigning up yonder where the snows never melted and the ice-fields clung to the mountain-side the whole year through. Nancy shivered, and the brown horse, trembling too, shouldered close to her. But Beatrice, in the door of the tent, turned suddenly to regard John Herrick with steady eyes, with a look as fixed and determined as his very own.