The length split open, but the axe slipped out of his bleeding hands, falling somewhere in the shadows beyond. He must crawl after it; he didn’t know how many more lengths there were to split. It was strange that he couldn’t keep his feet. And how deep and still was the night that dropped over him!
How long he groped for the axe handle in the snow he never knew. But he lay still at last. Twilight deepened about him, and the wind wept like a ghost risen from the sea. The very flame of his life was burning down to embers.
Thus it came about that Doomsdorf missed the sound of his axe against the wood. Swinging a lantern, a titantic figure among the snow-laden trees, he tramped down to investigate. Bess, semi-conscious again, wakened when the lantern light danced into her eyes. But it took him some little time to see Ned’s dark form in the snow.
The reason was, it was lying behind a mighty pile of split fuel. The light showed that only green branches, too small to be of value, remained of the two spruce. And Doomsdorf grunted, a wondering oath, deep in his throat.
They had been faithful slaves. Putting his mighty arm around them, each in turn, he half carried, half dragged them into the warmth of the cabin.
XVIII
Ned was spared the misery and despair that overswept Doomsdorf’s cabin the first night of his imprisonment. His master dropped him on the floor by the stove, and there he lay, seemingly without life, the whole night through. Even the sound of the wind could not get down into that dim region of half-coma where he was: he heard neither its weird chant on the cabin roof, or that eerie, sobbing song that it made to the sea, seemingly the articulation of the troubled soul of the universe. He did not see the snow piling deeper on the window ledge; nor sit straining in the dreadful, gathering silence of the Arctic night. The promised reward of food was not his because he could not get up to take it.
Yet he was not always deeply insensible. Sometimes he would waken with a knowledge of wracking pain in his muscles, and sometimes cold would creep over him. Once he came to himself with the realization that some one was administering to him. Soft, gentle hands were removing his wet, outer garments, rolling him gently over in order to get at them, slipping off his wet shoes and stockings. A great tenderness swept over him, and he smiled wanly in the lantern light.
Since he was a child, before the world was ever too much with him, no living human being had seen him smile in quite this way. It was a smile of utter simplicity, childishly sweet, and yet brave too,—as if he were trying to hearten some one who was distressed about him. He didn’t feel the dropping tears that were the answer to that smile, nor feel the heart’s glow, dear beyond all naming, that it wakened. To the girl who, scarcely able herself to stand erect, had crept from her warm cot to serve him, it seemed almost to atone for everything, to compensate for all she had endured.
“Lenore?” the man whispered feebly.