The Snowshoe Trail

by Edison Marshall

"Turn back," he said. "Turn your horse, Virginia—easy as you can."

At the same instant he turned his own horse back into the full fury of the torrent. It had been his plan to camp alone on the other side of the river, returning to the party in the better light of the morning; but there was not an instant's hesitation in turning to battle it again. His brave horse, obedient yet to his will, ventured once more into that torrent of peril. Virginia, cool and alert, pressed the bridle rein against her horse's neck to turn him.

On the bank Lounsbury and Vosper gazed in fascinated terror. Buster wheeled, struggling to keep his feet. Mulvaney pushed on, clear to the deepest, wildest portion of the stream. And then Virginia's horse pitched forward into the wild waters.

Perhaps the animal had simply made a misstep, possibly an irregularity in the river bottom had upset his balance. The waters seemed to pounce with merciless fury, and struck with all their power.

In the half-light it was impossible even for Bill to follow the lightning events of the next second. He saw the horse struggle, flounder, then roll on his back from the force of the current. It swept him down as the wind sweeps a straw. And he saw Virginia shake loose from the saddle.

He had but an instant's glimpse of a white face in the gray water, of hair that streamed; an instant's realization of a faint cry that the waters obscured. And then he sprang to her aid.

He could do nothing else. When the soul of the man was made it was given a certain strength, and certain basic laws were laid down by which his life was to be governed. That strength sustained him now, those laws held him in bondage. He could be false to neither.

He knew the terror of that gray whirlpool below. He had every reason to believe that by no possible effort of his could he save the girl; he would only throw away his own life too. The waters were icy cold: swiftly would they draw the life-giving heat from their bodies. Soaked through, the cold of the night and the forest would be swift to claim them if by any miracle they were able to struggle out of the river. Yet there was not an instant's delay. The full sweep of his thoughts was like a flash of lightning in the sky; he was out of the saddle almost the instant that the waters engulfed her. He sprang with his full strength into the stream.

On the bank the two men saw it as in a dream: the horse's fall, the upheaval of the water as the animal struggled, a flash of the girl's face, and then Bill's leap. They called out in their impotence, and they gazed with horror-widened eyes. But almost at once the drama was hidden from them. The twilight dropped its gray curtains between; besides, the waters had swept their struggling figures down the stream and out of their sight.

Already the river looked just the same. Mulvaney, riderless, was battling toward them through the torrent, but the stress and struggle of the second before had been instantly cut short. There was no spreading ripples, no break in the gray surface of the stream to show where the two had fallen. The stream swept on, infinite, passionless for all its tumult, unconquerable,—like the River of Death that takes within its depths the souls of men, never to yield them, never to show whence they have gone.