He held to his staggering run for an hour, seeking bare spots in the timber, travelling on top of windfalls when he found them, hiding his trail in uncanny fashion, before his body grew warm enough to thaw the icy bandages. Then he halted and, by the light of the cold moon, bared his shoulder and took stock. It was a bad, ragged wound. He moved the shoulder and smiled sardonically as he noted that no bone was touched.
From the butt of a shattered windfall he tore a flat sliver of clean pine. With his teeth he worried it down to a proper size, and with handkerchief and belt he bound it over the wound so tightly that it sunk deep into the muscles of the shoulder. It chafed and cut the skin and started the blood in half a dozen places, but he pulled the belt up another hole despite the inclination to grimace from pain.
“Suffer, Body,” he muttered, “suffer all you please. You’ve nothing to say about this. Your job for the present is merely to serve life by keeping it going. Later on you may grow whole again. I shall need you.”
He buttoned his mackinaw with difficulty and, finding an open space, turned and took his bearings. Far behind him a dull red glow on the sky marked the location of Cameron-Dam Camp. From this he turned, carefully scanning the heavens, until above the top of the timber he caught the weird glint of the northern lights. That way lay his course.
The white man’s country stopped with the timber in which he stood. Beyond was Indian country, the bleak, barren Dead Lands, a wilderness too bare of timber to tempt the logger, a land of ridge upon ridge of ragged rock, unexplored by white man, save for a rare mining prospector, and uninhabited save for the half-starved camp of the people of Tillie, the Chippewa, Reivers’ slave, by the power of the love she bore him.
White men shunned the white wastes of the Dead Lands as, in warmer climes, they shun the unwatered sands of the desert. That was why Reivers sought it. Out there in the camp of Tillie’s people he could lie safe, well fed, well nursed, until his wound healed and the strength of his body came back to him. And then....
“Cheer up, Body!” he chuckled as he started northward. “We’ll make the world pay bitterly for all of this when we’re in shape again. For the present we’re going north, going north, going north. You can’t stop, Body; you can’t lay down. Groan all you want to. You’re going to be dragged just as far to-night as if you weren’t shot up at all.”
CHAPTER XXIII—THE GIRL WHO WAS NOT AFRAID
Break of day in Winter time comes to the Dead Lands slowly and without enthusiasm, as if the rosy morning sun wearied at the hopeless landscape which its rays must illumine. Aimless rock formation was a drug on the creation’s market the day that the Bad Lands were made. Gigantic boulders, box-like bluffs, ragged rock-spires, cliffs and plateaus of bare rock were in oversupply.
Nature, so a glimpse of the place suggests, had resolved to get rid of a vast surplus of ugly, useless stone, and with one cast of its hands flung them solidly down and made the Dead Lands. There they lie, hog-back, ridge, gully and ravine, hopelessly and aimlessly jumbled and tumbled, a scene of desolate greyness by Summer; by Winter the raw, bleak ridges and spires, thrusting themselves through the covering of snow like unto the bones of a half concealed skeleton.