He got down, and though the bags were heavy, with Sally’s assistance he managed to hoist the first of them on to his shoulders. Then he staggered with it up the steep foot-trail that climbed the slope. He was more or less accustomed to carrying bags of grain between store and wagon, but his mittened hands were numbed, and his joints were stiff with cold. 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 by-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, like other women in that country, she had seen men struck down by half-trained horses, crushed by collapsing strawpiles, and once or twice gashed by mower blades. This was no doubt why she remembered that the impatient team would probably move on if she left the sleigh, and therefore drove the horses 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 filtered 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 grayish-white in the faint silvery light.
“Gregory,” she cried hoarsely.
The man opened his eyes, and blinked at her in a half-dazed manner. “Fell down,” he said. “Think I felt my leg go—and my side’s stabbing me. Go for somebody.”
Sally glanced round, and noticed that the grain bag lay burst open not far away. She fancied that he had clung to it after he lost his footing, which explained why he had fallen so heavily, but that was not a point of any consequence now. There was nobody who could help her within two leagues of the spot, and it was evident that she could not leave him there to freeze. Then she noticed that the trees grew rather farther apart just there, and rising swiftly she ran back to bring the team. The ascent was steep, and she had to urge the horses, with sharp cries and blows from her mittened hand, among shadowy tree trunks and through snapping undergrowth before she reached the spot where Hawtrey lay. He looked up at her when at last the horses stood close beside him.
“You can’t turn them here,” he told her faintly.
Sally was never sure how she managed it, for the sleigh drove against the slender trunks, and the fiery beasts, terrified by the snapping of the undergrowth, were almost unmanageable; but at last they were facing the descent again, and she stooped and twined her arms about the shoulders of Hawtrey, who now lay almost against the sleigh.
“It’s going to hurt, Gregory, but I have got to get you in,” she warned him.
Then she gasped, for Hawtrey was a man of full stature, and it was a heavy lift. She could not raise him wholly, and he cried out once when his injured leg trailed in the snow. Still, with the most strenuous effort she had ever made she moved him a yard or so, and then staggering fell with her side against the sleigh. She felt faint with the pain of it, but with another desperate lift she drew him into the sleigh, and let him sink down gently upon the bag that still lay there. His eyes had shut again, and he said nothing now.