“Tell me all!” commanded Haig. “But wait!” He pointed to Marion.
Marion’s babbling had slowly subsided, and ceased. Pete rose and went to her noiselessly on his moccasined 320 feet; and after looking at her a moment stepped cautiously back.
“She quiet now. Sleep soon,” he said.
And it was so. The next time he slipped over to her, the girl’s eyes were closed, and soon she had sunk into a profound slumber from which she did not awake until late the next morning.
Meanwhile Pete took up his story. Smythe had delivered Marion’s message, and had told them what he feared. Claire’s knowledge of the state of Marion’s heart and mind enabled her to guess the worst, but Seth scouted the idea of her trying to reach the top of Thunder Mountain, or of Murray permitting her to try it. So two days were lost before the alarm was sounded by Murray, who, after two attempts to reach the top of the mountain, had given up and ridden to the Park for help.
The whole valley responded to the call, and the most desperate efforts were made to reach the plateau, but the storms that Haig and Marion had heard in their sheltered gulch were of such fury and continuity that the hardiest of the ranchmen were unable to prevail against them. Huntington, half-crazed by the thought of the two days he had allowed to be lost, had gone farther than any of the others, and had been rescued with difficulty by some of his neighbors, who found him lying senseless at the foot of the ascent to the Devil’s Chair, where the wind had hurled him back down the slope. Smythe was among those who saved him, for the little tutor had let the last stage go without him, and was one of the most reckless in the attacks on the mountain.
All these efforts having failed, and the winter having fallen with exceptional suddenness and severity, even. Huntington was forced to accept the general opinion that nothing more could be done; that they could only wait for summer, when they could go to the mountain top and bring back Marion’s body––and doubtless Haig’s too. And so, said Huntington, the feud was ended.
One person alone in the Park refused to admit all this. Pete was forced indeed to admit it in theory, but he was resolved to prove it or disprove it on his own account. He had studied Thunder Mountain from the ridge above the ranch house all that day of Sunnysides’ escape, and the next. And he remembered now that a period of calm had followed the storm on that second day. If Haig or Marion, or both of them, had by chance reached the flat top in that interval, they might have crossed, and might be now somewhere in the forests on the other side.
He went to Parker, talked with him long about the character of the Black Lake country, induced him to draw the crude map, and then visited Seth and Claire. Seth shook his head gloomily, but Claire eagerly proceeded to assemble enough supplies to have loaded down a pack horse. There followed a pitifully comical struggle with her before her “first aid” was reduced to what Pete could carry in his canvas knapsack,––a small roll of underwear, needles and thread, bandages and a packet of household medicines in addition to Pete’s own selection of a strip of bacon, a dozen onions, two score of vegetable soup tablets, two cans of condensed milk, small quantities of coffee and tea, salt and pepper, two cakes of 322 soap and (especially insisted on by Pete) a plug of black tobacco and a pipe.