The survivors waited an hour for the frothy torrent to go down, so that they could ford it by offering an angular resistance, all supporting the upstream leader against the still raging current. Then, rigging up temporary snowshoes out of fragments of elder and their ragged robes, they began to glide over the fresh floor, hardly firm enough yet to support even their restless skimming. They were five hours reaching a place of refuge near the secluded cave which Ridge did not wish to make of public knowledge.
Of the Crows and the Bois Brulés there was not a trace. Such a storm could have made one huge snowball of waggons and cattle, and trundled it irresistibly down the steppes into the gullies of the Bad Lands of Montana.
[CHAPTER XI.]
THE IRRESISTIBLE BAIT.
The band of gold grabbers, whose prisoner Miss Maclan had become, had met the snowstorm supinely. They had, besides, obeyed their prudent leader by remaining buried in its protective mantle until the day was broken. The ravine crest had quickly been banked up, so that shielded them; and the marshland, offering no poor resistance to the tempest, had turned no gusts back. They had suffered the least of any exposed in that time of anguish. The danger over, they set to cleaning the camp with coarse jokes, and thronged to breakfast at a bugle call, after having worked on a cup of coffee alone with the wolfish appetite of sojourners in that high latitude. They were well provisioned, none of the wormy "crackers," rank pork, and burnt horse bean coffee of commerce, but good flour bread, deer and bear meat, and honest salt pork. Captain Kidd would have lost half the troop in this onerous wintry expedition with an inferior table.
For the leaders a marquee had been erected, raised of the canvas that sheltered them nightly, in which a folding table stood on picket pins for legs, so that the guests could squat around. Well loaded with hearty fare and various liquors, it was the article of furniture most prominent.
The captain and his lieutenants were received by a youth of eighteen, who took their rifles with the address of an experienced servant, and a Negro.
As soon as he arrived Kidd bade the latter withdraw.