The poor creature was left behind, although Beatrice leaned from her saddle to touch the soft anxious nose that was thrust out to her, and although a pleading whinny could be heard long after the darkness had swallowed up the suffering pony.
They went on steadily and quickly now, with Beatrice nodding in her saddle from unbelievable weariness. They were fording a stream; they were threading the grove of aspen-trees; they had reached the last mile of their journey. The whispering leaves were all speaking together in the morning breeze; the birds were beginning to sing; the darkness had faded so that the light of Beatrice’s lantern had shrunk to the pale ghost of a flame. She looked back to see the bare granite slope above her turn from gray to rose, and to see the stark summit of Gray Cloud Mountain shine in sudden silver radiance as the sunrise touched it.
Almost immediately she saw the men ahead of her stop, dismount, and lean over the litter.
“He is awake, and I think he wants you,” one of them said to Nancy, but she listened and shook her head.
“He is not really conscious,” she answered, “and it is my Aunt Anna that he is asking for.”
It was a week, a dragging, interminable week, before any one was able to know just what were to be the results of that fateful expedition up the slopes of Gray Cloud Mountain. Nancy, stiff and aching in every muscle from so much unwonted riding, was the first to recover and to set about her housekeeping. Beatrice had sprained her knee in that perilous moment when she dropped the ax over the mountain-side, but she had scarcely noticed the mishap until, slipping from the saddle at her own door, she found herself unable to walk into the house. For three days she was almost helpless; by the end of seven, however, she was able to get about and help Nancy and Christina with their work.
Christina had come to stay at the cabin so that the girls might not be alone, for Aunt Anna had moved to John Herrick’s house. It seemed at first that she had found her brother only in time to part with him again, for through four terrible days he lay so ill that not even Dr. Minturn could have much hope. Perhaps no one knew until that dreadful time how brave Aunt Anna could be. It was she who was cheerful; it was she who was hopeful and kept up the courage of the others; it was her tired, white, but smiling face upon which John Herrick’s eyes first fell when he opened them to consciousness again.
The three girls were standing in the door and Dr. Minturn was with them, but it was only his sister that John Herrick saw.
“Anna,” he said, “I have had a bad dream, I think.”
“Yes,” she nodded gravely. “We have all been dreaming, but at last we are all awake.”