“Poor Claire!” said Marion, with a tremulous little laugh, when Pete told her how the knapsack was packed.
And Haig looked across at her dizzily, as if the fumes of the strong tobacco had gone to his head.
Their situation was still miserable enough, but the Indian contrived to make it less unendurable. He knew some knacks of cookery that availed to make their venison and rabbit palatable; and the tea and coffee cheered them beyond all possibility of expression. No longer required to toil; with clean underwear; with 324 soap for her blackened face and hands, Marion recovered her strength, or much of it, with amazing swiftness. Pete made a rough coat and even a skirt for her of deerskin. The coat was of double thickness, and very warm indeed, and so she gave back to Haig the remnant of the leather coat she had been wearing, which was now needed to cover his ragged corduroy. Then came moccasins, and better crutches for Haig; and so they settled down with new courage for what they thought would be a long wait through the implacable winter.
Haig kept his secret, or supposed he was keeping it. Marion did not indeed remember how he had taken her in his arms in her delirium; rather, if there was a faint but insistent recollection of the embrace it was intangible and unreal. She had dreamed so often of that longed-for embrace that the reality was inseparable from the imagined. Nor was she aware of the revelation that had come to Haig, as if a dazzling light had broken through the walls of the cavern. But though he might keep his secret he could not conceal from her the change that had come over him, the tenderness and wonder and humility that had succeeded his hardness and scepticism and belligerency. She detected that alteration in every look he gave her, in every movement he made in waiting upon her, in every tone of his speech, though the words were the most commonplace. And in her great faith she was not surprised. But she was thrilled. The knowledge ran through her veins like a living fire, a better nourishment than food, a more potent cure than any medicine.
So the long days, not quite so long as they used to be, 325 marched on. Despite the skilful services of Pete they were still always cold, always hungry, always weary for want of sleep, and always dirty and unkempt. Then there came a day when Pete astonished them. He brought in from the forest certain small limbs of tough wood, and began to trim them and bend them into shapes that they were presently able to recognize. Snowshoes!
“You don’t mean––Can we do it?” cried Haig incredulously.
“Can’t stay here,” was Pete’s short reply.
True; they could not stay there; it was just what Haig had been thinking, or trying to avoid thinking. But how would Marion be able to endure that terrible journey over Simpson’s Pass? For her part she said nothing, but her eyes met Philip’s; she reached her hand to him, and he clasped it tightly.
Three weeks after Pete’s arrival he began gradually to inure Haig and Marion to living and moving in the snow. He taught them to walk on snowshoes, to climb steep slopes on them, to pick their way among the trees. There were countless falls in deep drifts, and headlong plunges, and ungraceful wallowings in the snow. But they knew their lives depended on these labors, and they were even able to laugh at some of their awkward performances. These exercises were, moreover, very good for them. Ill-nourished though they were, the natural color crept back into their cheeks, the blood flowed briskly again, through their chilled veins, their muscles were strengthened by their struggles with the winds and the snow that still came on with unremitted vigor. Then Pete went a step farther in the preparations for the crucial test. Not only must they spend the greater 326 part of the day outside the cave, but they must sleep, or try to sleep, a few hours every night in the snow, wrapped in their blankets, in holes scooped out under the lee of a snowbank, while the Indian stood guard nearby.