CHAPTER VII
HABAKKUK’S LIGHT
Stars, frost, and glimmer of snow blended into a bluish, dim suffusion, a hyperborean obscurity that was neither light nor darkness. The figure ahead showed as a blotch of denser twilight, dissolving, rather than moving, down the slope. Miles prowled after, straining his eyes to detect in what quarter of the black undergrowth it was absorbed and blotted.
No light, no sound, could either guide or betray him. His impulse had been to stride along, to overtake and question the sailor; but so, reflection told him, he might destroy his only chance to learn the truth. He waded onward, accordingly, with great care; and slipping through fir branches, gained free footing in the beaten path. No wind stirred; and though faint aerial changes drew widely over the valley, not a bristle whispered among all the drooping, padded layers of black and white. With the old expectancy he came to the buried quarter-deck. No one appeared.
He crossed, and was passing into the evergreen gap beyond, when he ran solidly against some person emerging. With an angry start he grappled the stranger by both arms. For an instant they wrestled silently. Wrapped in a long rough ulster or cloak, his opponent not only struggled at a disadvantage, but exerted neither weight nor force. Miles felt a lithe body strain furiously to escape, and then, after a single spasm of resistance, unexpectedly surrender. At the same moment, as they lurched back against the yielding support of young boughs, in a downfall of clotted snow, he felt his cheek swept at once sharply by fir needles and softly by disordered hair. In shifting holds, his bare hand closed tight round a bare wrist, surprisingly frail and warm.
“Oh, you’re hurting me!” complained the captive in a fierce whisper. “Let go!”
Whether at the voice, the contact, or the recognition, a quick thrill ran through his fore-arm, like the instant passage of a mysterious current.
“It’s you!” Both spoke at once, with the same manner, the same thought.
Looking for Tony, he had found his companion of the fog. This surpassing wonder overwhelmed him. Yet in that flaming instant, in the very rout of reason, Miles—where a wise man or a fool might have inferred obviously and ignobly—saw the facts with the ease of inspiration.
“We’re out on the same errand,” he whispered. “You’re looking for your father?”