Saxe felt a catching sensation at the breast, a tingling in the temples and cheeks, as if his veins were startled and his blood running wild; and he stole his hand softly out from under the rug, to try and reach his companions and rouse them to a sense of the impending danger—trying to recollect at the same moment where the ice-axes had been placed when they lay down overnight.
But at that moment there was a sharper crack than ever, and a faint odour of burning, followed by the quick crackling so familiar when a green pine bough is thrown upon the flames.
“Oh, what a coward I am!” thought Saxe, sinking back and placing his enlaced fingers beneath his head, as he gazed straight up at the dark branches above. “Just as if a bear would come and attack us, even if there was one anywhere near! He’d scuffle off as soon as he smelt man.”
“Perhaps not if he was very hungry,” he thought, after a few minutes. “But I do wish I could feel brave, like men do, and not turn shaky and queer at the least thing. Here was I imagining all that rubbish just because I heard a stick broken by old Melchior to make the fire. Yesterday all I had to do was to walk along a shelf of rock, with some water running down below me. If it had been out in the open sunshine I shouldn’t have minded a bit; but because it was a little dark I fancied all sorts of stuff. Of course it was a bit startling to see a fellow go head over heels into a torrent along with a moke and be swept away; but I don’t believe old Melk was half so much frightened as I was.”
“It’s very silly lying here,” he said to himself again, as the scent of the burning pine-wood increased. “Bit cold outside the rug; but we left the door and the windows open last night, and that’s healthy all the same. I do wish, though, I could get on without being scared so soon. Perhaps it’s all through being ill last year and feeling so weak. But I didn’t seem weak yesterday. I was precious tired, but so was Mr Dale. I’m afraid I’m a coward, and I suppose all I can do is to hide it and not let people see.”
“They sha’n’t see!” he muttered, after a few minutes; and then he lay still, thinking of home, his mother and father, and of their ready consent when Mr Dale offered to take him as his companion in an experimental trip to the high Alps.
“I wonder what they are all doing now?” he thought. “Asleep, of course. I don’t believe my mother would sleep comfortably, though, if she knew I was lying out here like this, with no bed-curtains and the snow just over us. It is rum, though—summer and winter all muddled up together so closely that you stand with your right leg in July, picking flowers and catching butterflies, and the left leg in January, so that you can turn over and make a snowball or pick icicles off the rocks.”
A pleasant, drowsy sensation began to steal over him, and he was about to give way to it, when the idea came like a flash that it would be idle and cowardly; and this thought made him spring up, and fold the rug in which he had been rolled; and after a glance at where Mr Dale still slept, he went softly out of the clump of trees in the direction where he could hear the crackling, to find Melchior in the act of placing the tin kettle they had brought upon the fire.
“Good morning, herr. A fine day.”
“Not much day about it,” said Saxe, with a slight shiver. “What time is it?”