"It's on the second grade, up from Tollifer. It's fairly easy there, you know, for ten or twelve miles. They're making that without difficulty—their work won't come until they strike the snowsheds at Crystal Lake. Oh—" and there was in the voice all the yearning, the anxiety that a pent-up soul could know—"I wish I were a man now! I wish I were a man—to help!"
"I hope—" and Houston said it without thought of bravado—"that I may have the strength for both of us. I'm a man—after a sort. I'm going to work with them."
"But—"
He knew what she meant and shook his head.
"No—she does not need me. My presence would mean nothing to her. I can't tell you why. My place—is down there."
For an instant Medaine Robinette looked at him with frankly questioning eyes, eyes which told that a thought was beginning to form somewhere back in her brain, a question arising as to his guilt in at least one of the things which circumstances had arrayed against him. Some way Barry felt that she knew that a man willing to encounter the dangers of a snowy range would hurry again to the side of the woman for whom he had dared them, unless— But suddenly she was speaking, as though to divert her thoughts.
"We'll have about three hours—from the looks of the sky. Unless conditions change quickly, there'll not be another blow before night. It's our chance. We'd better cut this cord—the one in the lead may fall and pull the other one over. We had better make haste."
Houston stepped before her. A moment later they were edging their way down the declivity of what once had been a railroad track, at last to veer. The drifts from the mountain side had become too sharp; it was easier to accept the more precipitous and shorter journey, straight downward, the nearest cut toward those welcome spires of smoke.
Gradually the snow shook or was melted from their clothing, through sheer bodily warmth. Black dots they became,—dots which appeared late in the afternoon to the laboring crews of the snow-fighters far below; dots which appeared and disappeared, edging their way about beetling precipices, plunging forward, then stopping; pulling themselves out of the heavier drifts, where drops of ten and even twenty feet had thrown them; swinging and tacking; scrambling downward in long, almost running descents, then crawling slowly along the ice walls, while the jutting peaks about them seemed to close them in, seemed to threaten and seek to engulf them in their pitfalls, only to break from them at last and allow them once more to resume their journey.
Breaks and stops, falls and plunges into drift after drift; through the glasses the workers below could see that a man was in the lead, with something strapped to his back, which the woman in the rear adjusted now and then, when it became partially displaced by the plunging journey. Banks of snow cut them off; snowshoes sank in air pockets—holes made by protruding limbs of the short, gnarled trees of timber line,—and through these the man fought in short, spasmodic lunges, breaking the way for the woman who came behind, never stopping except to gather strength for a fresh attack, never ceasing for obstacle or for danger. Once, at the edge of an overhanging ledge, he scrambled furiously, failed and fell,—to drop in a drift far below, to crawl painfully back to the waiting dot above, and to guide her, by safer paths, on downward. Hours! The dots grew larger. The glasses no longer were needed. On they came, stumbling, reeling, at last to stagger across the frozen, wind-swept surface of a small lake and toward the bunk cars of the snow crews. The woman wavered and fell; he caught her. Then double-weighted, a pack on his back, a form in his arms, he came on, his blood-red eyes searching almost sightlessly the faces of the waiting, stolid, grease-smeared men, his thick voice drooling over bloody lips: