Dazzled and confused, she rubbed her eyes, then motioned toward the tent where John Herrick lay, since words of explanation would not come quickly enough. She held her breath, so it seemed to her, through all the minutes that the doctor was bending to examine the unconscious man. When he straightened up again to speak to her, how comforting it was to hear that big voice booming out where the last sound had been John Herrick’s failing whisper!
“He has gone a long way,” the old doctor said, “but please heaven, we’ll bring him back again.”
CHAPTER XIV
HASTY WORDS
In the gray light that is the ghost of morning, a fantastic procession went slowly down the headlong slope of Dead Man’s Mile. The tall doctor strode ahead with his swinging lantern, and behind him came the two men he had brought, carrying John Herrick between them upon a litter of blankets. Nancy, following them clung fast to her pommel and was glad the saddle was so deep that she could not well fall out of it, no matter how much the doctor’s pony, upon which she was mounted, swayed and slid down the path. For guidance, he was left almost as much to himself as was the extra horse following at the end of the line, whose nose was so close to the tail of the pony that Beatrice rode, and whose footsteps were guided by the second lantern that bobbed and jerked from her saddle-bow.
“It was the next thing to impossible to climb up in bright daylight,” Beatrice thought. “How can we ever go down in the dark, with a helpless person to carry?”
But the doctor had declared that further delay meant too much danger to John Herrick, and that the attempt must be made. Down they went, past the rocky shelf where the girls had found him, past the dizzy precipice where Beatrice had dropped the ax and had so nearly followed it, over barriers that looked impassable, down steep declivities that were nothing but wells of blackness and hidden danger. A word of direction from the doctor, a breathless squeak from Nancy once when her horse lurched suddenly beneath her, the steady scuffle of the ponies’ feet—those were the only sounds. They had passed the icy shallows of the tumbling stream, they had looped over the jutting shoulder of smooth rock where there was scarcely a foothold: there was a long, stiff-legged jump for each pony, and they were down.
Through the rustling underbrush of the lower slope, the main trail leading downward from Gray Cloud Pass was firm under their feet.
“Looks like Broadway, don’t it, after that squirrel track back yonder?” observed one of the men, as they stopped to rest for a little. The other man went to catch Nancy’s pony which had been turned loose before the storm and which now came, stamping and snorting, through the dark, drawn by the lantern light and by the desire for company of its own kind.
It was possible to carry the litter between two horses now, so that the doctor mounted, left one man to follow on foot, and ordered them all to press forward. A moving shadow in the darkness proved to be John Herrick’s black mare, who had managed to scramble to her feet and stood, with head drooping and one leg helpless, beside the path.
“We can’t stop for her now,” the doctor said. “I will send some one back to see if there is anything to be done.”