“Stranger,” said MacGregor, holding out his hand, “I did not like you when first I saw you. I do not say I like you now. But—shake hands.”
Reivers hurriedly shook hands and tore himself away. He had resolved to go without seeing Hattie, and he was inwardly raging at himself because he found this resolution hard to keep. He laid his course for the nearest rise of land, half a mile away. Once over the rise the cabin would be shut out of sight, and even though he should weaken and look back there would be no danger of letting her see.
Bent far over, head down, lunging along with the cunning strides of the trained snowshoer, he topped the rise and dropped down on the farther side. There he paused to rest himself and draw breath, and as he stood there Hattie MacGregor and her dog-team swept at right angles across his trail.
She was riding boy-fashion, half sitting, half lying, on the empty sledge, driving the dogs furiously for their daily exercise. She did not speak. She merely looked up at him as she went past. Then she was gone in a flurry of snow, and Reivers went forth on his quest of power with a curse on his lips and in his heart the determination that no weakening memories of a girl’s wistful eyes should interfere with his aim.
CHAPTER XXVII—ON THE TRAIL OF FORTUNE
Reivers travelled steadily for an hour at the best pace that was in him. It was not a good pace, for he was far from being in his old physical condition, and the lift and swing of a snowshoe will cramp the calves and ankle-tendons of a man grown soft from long bed-lying, no matter how cunning may be his stride.
He swore a little at first over his slow progress. He was like a wolf, suddenly released from a trap, who desires to travel far, swiftly and instantly, and who finds that the trap has made him lame.
Reivers wanted to put the MacGregor cabin, and the scenes about it, which might remind him of Hattie, behind him with a rush. But the rush, he soon found, threatened to cripple him, so he must perforce give it up. The trail that he had set out to make was not one that any man, least of all one recently convalescent, could hope to cover in a single burst of speed.
He was going to the Winter camp of the people of Tillie, the squaw. The camp lay somewhere in the northwest. How far away he did not know; and it was no part of his plans to arrive at the camp of the Chippewas depleted in energy and resource. The role he had set out to play now called for the character of the Snow-Burner at his best—dominant, unconquerable. Therefore, when he found that his first efforts at speed threatened to cripple him with the treacherous snow-shoe cramp, he resigned himself to a pace which would have shamed him had he been in good condition. It was poor snow-shoeing, but at the end of an hour he had placed between himself and all possible sight of Hattie MacGregor the first ragged rock-ramparts of the Dead Lands, and he was content.
On the western slope of a low ridge he unstrapped his snow-shoes and sat down on a bare boulder for a rest. His heart throbbed nervously from his exertion and his lungs gasped weakly. But with each breath of the crisp air his strength was coming back to him, and in his head the brains of the Snow-Burner worked as of old. He smiled with great self-satisfaction. He was not considering his condition, was not counting the difficulties that lay in his path. He was merely picturing, with lightning-like play of that powerful mental machinery of his, the desperate nature of the adventure toward which he was travelling.