But it was just words. No weapon remained in his hands. "I'll get you yet, you devil!" he screamed, almost incoherently. "I'll lay in wait and kill you—you can't get away! The wolves have got your grizzly meat—you can't go without food."
His voice was shrill and terrible in the silence of the winter night. Even in the stress and inward tumult that was the reaction of the battle, Bill could not help but hear. He didn't doubt that the words were true: he realized in an instant what the loss of the grizzly flesh would mean. But his only wish was that he had killed the man when he had him helpless in his hands.
He remembered Joe then, and listened for any sound from him. He heard none, and like a man in a dream he felt his way to the lifeless form beside the wall. He seized the shoulders of the breed's coat, dragged him like a sack of straw, and as easily hurled his body through the doorway into the drifts. Two bodies lay there now. But only the coyotes, seekers of the dead, had interest in them.
He turned, then stood swaying slightly, in the doorway. No wind stirred over the desolate wastes without. The cabin was ominously silent. He could hear his own troubled breathing; but where there was no stir, no murmur from the corner where he had left Virginia. A ghastly terror, unknown in the whole stress of the battle, swept over him.
"Virginia," he called. "Where are you?"
From the dark, far end of the cabin he heard the answer,—a voice low and tremulous such as sometimes heard from the lips of a sick child. "Here I am, Bill," she replied. "I'm hit with a stray shot—and I believe—they've killed me."
XXXII
Was this their destiny,—utter and hopeless defeat in the moment of victory? Was this the way of justice that, after all they had endured, they should yet go down to death? They had fought a mighty fight, they had waged a cruel war against cold and hardship, they had known the full terror and punishment of the snow wastes in their dreadful adventure of the past two days; and had it all come to nothing, after all? Was life no more than this,—a cruel master that tortured his slaves only to give them death? These thoughts brought their full bitterness in the instant that Bill groped his way to Virginia's side.
His hands told him she was lying huddled against the wall, a slight, pathetic figure that broke the heart within the man. "Here I am," she said again, her voice not racked with pain but only soft and tender. He knelt beside her, then groped for a match. But whether the injury was small or great he felt that the issue would be the same.