She gave a sigh of relief and urged the dogs on. The road narrowed and ascended again. The mountain-side fell away, and she found herself on a narrow ledge with a vast chasm beneath. She thought of turning back, but there was no room to turn the dogs round. Catching her breath, she went carefully forward. A few small flakes of snow on her shoulders, and then the inky sky began to empty itself. It came down in a great mass, obliterating everything. A cold terror began to possess her. In the blinding snow she could not discern the path for more than a 248 yard or two ahead, and by the side of her yawned that dreadful chasm!
She edged in close to the perpendicular wall, peering into the whirling mass of snow. The dogs stopped, and she urged them on again, knowing that the pass must soon descend to the river.
Suddenly there was a fierce uproar among the dogs. The sled jerked forward, and commenced to move at tremendous speed. A slight wind created a funnel-like opening in the dense white cloud before her. She gave one long shriek of horror at the sight which met her eyes. The sled was on the very brink of a precipice! It hovered there for a moment—just long enough for her to fling herself sideways against the wall; then it, and the team, vanished over the side, taking a mass of snow down, down into the bottomless depths.
She crouched against the wall, petrified by what had happened. A thundering noise came up from the black hole, reverberating through the pass and over the mountains as sled and dogs were hurled to their doom. She put her fingers in her ears to keep out the dreadful sound. 249
It ceased, and the great silence came again. Faint and sick, she realized that her left shoulder was aching with intense pain through contact with the rock wall.
There was nothing to be done but go back and confess the catastrophe to Jim. She stood up and commenced creeping along the dreadful path. Her left arm was hanging in useless fashion, setting up acute pain at the shoulder.
The full significance of her folly came to her. She had driven a team of dogs worth at least a thousand dollars to oblivion. Their chief means of travel was gone, and hundreds of miles lay between them and civilization. How could she confess the loss to Jim? What would he say?
For an hour she plodded on through the deep snow, her mind ranging over the past. Whatever might be said of this wild husband of hers, he had played the game as he saw it. She had to admit this. Culture and breeding were very desirable things, but had he not some other natural quality which, at the least computation, balanced these attributes? Could any man of her own set have acted with greater respect for her womanhood than he? 250
Until recently she had been no companion to him—nothing but a continual drag on the wheel. She had hurt him in speech and action. She had deliberately set her mind on making clear to him his cultural and moral inferiority. In return for this he had given her to feel a complete sense of safety. Sleeping within a few feet of him she had never, for a moment, felt the slightest possibility of molestation or intrusion on his part. It had been easy to take this all for granted—because he was a wild man and she was a cultured woman. She had come to see that “wild men” did not show such a refinement of consideration, even though they might conceivably acknowledge their social inferiority. She knew of no other man with whom she could have entrusted herself as she did with this one. Moreover, he was her husband....
She was glad she was making things a little more pleasant for him. She saw that his natural gayety and joie de vivre, long subdued, were again welling up within him. But yesterday she had heard him singing, coming back from his day’s unfruitful task. She knew herself to be the 251 cause of that song. It was rather pleasant to reflect upon.