VIII
ON THE TRAIL
Darkness was settling down upon the mountains and the chill of the snow was in the air when Hetty Leger and Ingleby sat beside a crackling fire. Down in the great gorge beneath them the white mists were streaming athwart the climbing pines, and no sound broke the deep stillness but the restless stamping of the tethered pack-horses and the soft splash of falling water. Hetty had a brown blanket rolled about her, and there were hard red blotches where the mosquitoes had left their virus on the hand she laid upon it. Leger lay not far away, and his face was swollen, but Ingleby had escaped almost scatheless, as some men seem to do, from the onslaughts of the buzzing legions which had pursued them through the swampy hollows.
A blackened kettle, a spider—as a frying-pan is usually termed in that country—and a few plates of indurated fibre lay about the fire, for the last meal of the day was over, and it had been as frugal as any one who had not undertaken twelve hours' toil in that vivifying air would probably have found it unappetizing. Where resinous wood was plentiful Ingleby could make a fire, but he could not catch a trout or shoot a deer. Indeed, a man unaccustomed to the bush usually finds it astonishingly difficult even to see one, and provisions were worth a ransom in the auriferous wilderness into which they were pushing their way. They had spent several weeks in it now, travelling, where the trail was unusually good, eight to twelve miles a day, though there were occasions when they made less than half the distance with infinite difficulty, and Hetty alone knew what that journey had cost her.
The white peaks that gleamed ethereally high up in the blue, crystal lakes, and the endless ranks of climbing pines, scarcely appealed to her as she floundered through tangled undergrowth and ten-foot fern, or stumbled amidst the boulders beside thundering rivers. She had lain awake shivering, with the ill-packed fir twigs galling her weary body, high up on great hill shoulders, and fared Spartanly on a morsel of unsavoury salt pork and a handful of flour, while Ingleby set his lips now and then when he saw the little forced smile in her jaded face. It was no great consolation to reflect that other women in that country had borne as much and more.
"Walter," she said, "you and Tom are very quiet. I expect you're tired."
Ingleby smiled, though his heart smote him as he saw the weariness in her eyes.
"I certainly am," he said. "Still, we can't be half as worn out as you are. You were limping all the afternoon."
"If I was it was only the boot that hurt me," said Hetty. "All those loose stones and gravel made it worse, you see. How many miles have we come to-day?"
"I feel that it must have been forty, but you shall have a rest to-morrow; and you don't look as comfortable as you ought to now. Would you mind standing up a minute?"
Hetty rose, hiding the effort it cost her, and when he had shaken up the cedar twigs into a softer cushion sank gratefully down on them. Then she turned her face aside that he might not see the little flush that crept into it as he gravely tucked the coarse brown blanket round her.