Sally glanced up at him with a little nod. "You take hold with a good grip. Everybody allows that," she said. "The trouble is you let things go afterwards. You don't stay with it."
"Yes," assented Hawtrey. "I believe you have hit it, Sally. That's very much what's the matter with me."
"Then," said the girl with quiet insistence, "won't you try?"
A faint flush crept into Hawtrey's face. The girl was less than half-taught, and unacquainted with anything beyond the simple, strenuous life of the prairie. Her greatest accomplishments consisted of some skill in bakery and the handling of half-broken teams; but she had once or twice given him what he recognised as excellent advice. There was something incongruous in the situation, but, as usual, he preferred to regard it whimsically.
"I suppose I'll have to, if you insist. If ever I'm the grasping owner of the biggest farm in this district I'll blame you," he said.
Sally said nothing further on that subject, and some time later the sleigh went skimming down among the birches in a shallow ravine. Hawtrey pulled the horses up when they reached the bottom of it, and glanced up at a shapeless cluster of buildings that showed black amidst the trees.
"Lorton won't be back until to-morrow, but I promised to pitch the bags into his granary," he said. "If I hump them up the trail here it will save us driving round through the bluff."
He got down, and though the bags were heavy he managed to hoist the first of them on to his shoulders, with Sally's assistance, and then staggered up the steep foot-trail that climbed the slope with it. He was more or less accustomed to carrying bags of grain between store and waggon, but his mittened hands were numbed, and his joints were stiff with frost just then, and Sally noticed that he floundered rather wildly. In another moment or two, however, he vanished into the gloom among the trees, and she sat listening to the uneven crunch of his footsteps in the snow, until there was a sudden crash of broken branches, and a sound as of something falling heavily down a declivity. Then there was another crash, and stillness again.
Sally gasped, and clenched her mittened hands hard upon the reins as she remembered that Lorton's bye trail skirted the edge of a very steep bank, but she lost neither her collectedness nor her nerve. Presence of mind in the face of an emergency is probably as much a question of experience as of temperament, and, as it happened, she had, like other women in that country, seen men struck down by half-trained horses, crushed by collapsing strawpiles, and once or twice gashed by a mower blade. This was no doubt why she remembered that the impatient team would probably move on if she left the sleigh, and she drove them to the first of the birches before she got down. Then she knotted the reins about a branch, and called out sharply.
No answer came out of the shadows, and her heart beat unpleasantly fast as she plunged in among the trees, keeping below the narrow trail that went slanting up the side of the declivity, until she stopped, with another gasp, when she reached a spot where a ray of moonlight came filtering down. A limp figure in an old skin coat lay almost at her feet, and she dropped on her knees beside it in the snow. Hawtrey's face showed an unpleasant greyish-white in the faint silvery light.