"I'm 'most afraid you'll have to fix supper yourself to-night," he said. "Just now I don't quite know how I'm going to start to-morrow, though it will naturally have to be done."
Brooke glanced round at the grim ramparts of ice and snow that cut sharp against the indigo. Night as it was, there was no softness in that scheme of color lighted by the frosty scintillations of the stars, and a shiver ran through his stiffened limbs.
"Yes," he said. "Nobody not hardened to it could expect to stand more than another day in the open up here."
He got the meal ready, but very little was said during it, and for a few hours afterwards the doctor lay coughing in the smoke of the fire, while his gum-boots softened and grew hard again as he drew his feet, which pained him intolerably between whiles, a trifle further from the crackling brands. He staggered when at last Brooke, finding that shaking was unavailing, dragged him upright.
"Breakfast's almost ready, and we have got to make the mine by to-night," he said.
The doctor could never remember how they accomplished it, but his lips were split and crusted with coagulated blood, while there seemed to be no heat left in him, when Brooke stopped on a ridge of the hillside as dusk was closing in.
"The mine is close below us. In fact, we should have seen it from where we are," he said.
Worn out as he was, the doctor noticed the grimness of his tone. "The nearer the better," he said. "I don't quite know how I got here, but you scarcely seem at ease."
"I was wondering why Allonby, who does not like the dark, has not lighted up yet," Brooke said, drily. "We will probably find out in a few more minutes."
Then he went reeling down the descending trail, and did not stop again until he stood amidst the piles of débris and pine stumps, with the shanty looming dimly in front of him across the little clearing. It seemed very dark and still, and the doctor, who came up gasping, stopped abruptly when his comrade's shout died away. The silence that closed in again seemed curiously eerie.