Judith's tracks continued abruptly down the slope. Douglas followed for a few feet, then stopped. A horse had fallen here and rolled down the steep left wall. He dropped to his knees and followed the wide, snow-packed trail. He had not far to go. From the snow drifted over a rock protruded a horse's hoof. Doug swept the body free of snow. It was old Buster, with his right fore leg broken and a bullet wound in his head. Hot tears scalded Doug's wind-tortured eyes. After a moment of search for further details of the catastrophe, he crawled up the wall again and, after a frantic hunt, found a blurred single horse trail leading on from the spot whence Buster had slipped. He went back for his own horses, mounted Tom and pushed on downward.
But he could not continue long. It was soon dusk and he dared not risk losing Judith's tracks. When he came upon the next cedar clump, clinging precariously to the mountainside, he dismounted. Under the shelter of the trees, he fastened the horses. He trampled the snow for his fire-place and chopped a night's supply of wood. After he had eaten a hot supper, he wrapped himself in his blankets and huddled over the fire, consumed by anxiety.
The wind rushed by the cedars without pause. The hard, dry pellets of snow rattled on the trees. The horses, their chins hung with icicles, stood with bowed heads, motionless.
All of Doug's life passed in review before his sleepless eyes. He could not recall when he had not been shaping his days around Judith. Even when as children they had lived the snarling life of young pups, she had been the center of his universe. He wondered if love came to many men as it had come to him. He had not observed it in any other man in Lost Chief. Perhaps Peter had cared so. Perhaps in the outside world it was not infrequent. But whether it was a common sort of love or not, he could not picture himself without Judith in his life. If he should find her dead, farther down on this ghastly mountainside, he knew that the light and warmth within him would go out and that he never would finish the journey.
One by one he went over the steps of the past year that had culminated in this trip over Black Devil Pass. He realized that every step had been the result of his own years of mental conflict. Yet he could not see how he could have failed to take each step as he had taken it. His mind mysteriously refused to present an alternative. And, thinking thus, he was conscious of a sense of spiritual helplessness as if he were being borne on and on by forces quite beyond his control. And there came to him a sudden and shattering conviction that this terrible night of loneliness had been inevitable since the day of his birth. Call it Fate, he told himself, call it Destiny, call it what we might, something stronger than his own will had shaped his days toward this awful expedition. Awful, he thought, not from the physical aspect—he had endured as much in other ways—as from the quality of the events that had brought the expedition about. It was all wrong that Judith should have been in the state of mind that made it possible for her to put herself to such a wild flight. Revolt, the Mormon's wife had said it was. Revolt against what? Surely against something stupendous, something that a man was powerless to help her to free herself from or to bear.
Ah, Judith! Judith! Judith all fire, all wistfulness, all strength and beauty! What was he, after all, to hope to claim her, or even having won her, how was he to keep her? How was he to keep within his ken that restless, soaring spirit? What could he give her that would satisfy, and hold her? For the first time in many years, Douglas could have wept; wept for very sadness that Judith should be so lonely and so wistful.
How long he sat shivering with his burning eyes on the fire, Douglas did not know. He was roused by a faint cry above the wind. At first he thought it was a coyote. But when it repeated, he started to his feet and concentrated in an agony of attention on the sound. Once more it came, longdrawn, troubled, the howl of a dog. Doug dropped the blankets and strode from the shelter of the trees to deliver a long coo-ee. The wind was against him. There was no response.
He hurriedly dragged his entire supply of firewood before the shelter and set it to blazing. Then he plunged on foot downward through the wind-swept, snow-driven darkness.
It was a terrible journey. He slipped and fell so often and so far that when the light behind him dwindled to a faint point, he dared continue no farther. Standing waist-deep in snow, he whistled and called. But the cyclone wind drove the sound back into his teeth. Sick at soul, he prepared to turn back. He beat his arms across his chest, stamped his feet, slipped, and once more rolled downward. He brought up with a crash in a cedar clump. A dog barked and threw himself against Doug with a snarl that changed at once to a whine of joy.
"Wolf Cub! Wolf Cub! Where is she?"