"Help me roll the blankets," he commanded, "and take out enough food for breakfast. We can't stop to eat it here. I think we're in sight of the main trail; whether we can find it—in the snow—I don't know." She understood; usually the absence of vegetation on a well-worn trail makes a shallow covering of snow appear more level and smooth and thus possible to follow.
"I'm afraid the snow's already too deep," he continued, "but we can go on in a general direction for a while at least—unless the snow gets worse so I can't even guess the position of the sun. We must get farther into the thickets before we stop to eat."
They were strange figures in the snow flurries as they went to work to roll the blankets into a compact bundle. The food she had taken from their stores for breakfast he thrust into the pocket of his coat; the rest, with the blankets, she tied swiftly on the horse. They unfastened the animal and for a moment she stood holding the reins while Bruce crept back on the hillside to look for the trail.
The snow swept round them, and they felt the lowering menace of the cold. And at that instant those dread spirits that rule the wilderness, jealous then and jealous still of the intrusion of man, dealt them a final, deadly blow.
Its weapon was just a sound—a loud crash in a distant thicket—and a pungent message on the wind that their human senses were too blunt to receive. Bruce saw the full dreadfulness of the blow and was powerless to save. The horse suddenly snorted loudly, then reared up. He saw as in a tragic, dream the girl struggle to hold him; he saw her pulled down into the snow and the rein jerked from her hand. Then the animal plunged, wheeled, and raced at top speed away into the snow flurries. Some Terror that as yet they could not name had broken their control of him and in an instant taken from them this one last hope of safety.
XXXII
Bruce walked over to Linda, waiting in the snow on her knees. It was not an intentional posture. She had been jerked down by the plunging horse, and she had not yet completely risen. But the sight of her slight figure, her raised white face, her clasped hands, and the remorseless snow of the wilderness about her moved Bruce to his depths. He saw her but dimly in the snow flurries, and she looked as if she were in an attitude of prayer.
He came rather slowly, and he even smiled a little. And she gave him a wan, strange, little smile in return.
"We're down to cases at last," he said, with a rather startling quietness of tone. "You see what it means?"