For several minutes he lay, scarcely breathing, his eyes straining to bring the speck into comprehensible shape. His breath began to come rapidly. Presently he swore. The speck had become two specks now, a long narrow speck and a tiny one which moved beside it, and they were coming steadily up the valley toward where he lay.
“One man and a dog-team,” mused Reivers. “He won’t be travelling here without grub. Body, wake up! You are crying for food. Yonder it comes. Get ready to take it.”
Slowly, with long pauses between each movement, and taking care not to place his dark body against the white snow, Reivers dragged himself around to a hiding-place behind the boulder against which he had slept. The sun had risen higher now. Its rays were lighting the valley, and as he peered avidly around one side of the stone, Reivers could make out some detail of the two specks that moved so steadily toward him.
It was a four-dog team, travelling rapidly, and the man, on snow-shoes, travelled beside his team and plied his whip as he strode. Reivers’ brows drew down in puzzled fashion. The sledge which whirled behind the running dogs seemed flat and unloaded; the dogs ran in a fashion that told they were strong and fresh. Why didn’t the man ride?
Reivers drew back to take stock of the situation. The man might be a stranger, travelling hurriedly through the Dead Lands, or he might be one of the men from Cameron-Dam Camp. If the former, food might be had for a mere hail and the asking; if the latter—Reivers’s nostrils widened and he smiled.
Yet a third possibility existed. The man was travelling in strange fashion, running beside an apparently empty sled, and whipping his dogs along. So did men travel when they were fleeing from various reasons, and men fleeing thus do not go unarmed nor take kindly to having the trail of their flight witnessed by casual though starving strangers. Thus there was one chance that a hail and plea for food would be met with a friendly response; two chances that they would be met with lead or steel.
Reivers, not being a careless man, looked about for ways and means to place the odds in his favour. A hundred yards to the north of him the valley narrowed into a mere slit between two straight walls of rock. Through this gap the traveller must pass.
When Reivers had crawled to a position on the rock directly above the narrow opening, he lay flat down and grinned in peace. He was securely hidden, and the dog-driver would pass unsuspectingly, unready, thirty feet beneath where he lay. Things were looking well.
The driver and team came on at a steady pace. Even at a great distance, his stride betrayed his race and Reivers muttered, “White man,” and pushed to the edge of the bluff a huge, jagged piece of rock. The man might not listen to reason, and Reivers was taking no chances of allowing an opportunity to feed to slip by.
The sleigh still puzzled him. As it came nearer and nearer he saw that it was not empty. Something long and flat lay upon it. Reivers ceased to watch the driver and turned his scrutiny entirely to the bundle upon the sleigh. Minute after minute he watched the sleigh to the exclusion of everything else.