XXII
THE BLIZZARD
Garth had no conscious design in running; his muscles merely reacted in obedience to the grinding tumult in his brain. His eardrums rang with the fancied sound of Natalie's cries; and his eyeballs were seared with the picture of her shrinking in the brutal hands of Grylls. As he crashed through the wood, the little branches whipped his face unmercifully; and the spiny shoots of the jackpines tore his clothes. He ran full tilt into unyielding obstacles; and was flung aside, unconscious of the shock.
He instinctively sought the other camp. He found it deserted; the tent gone; the door of the empty cabin swinging idly in the wind. He came to a stop then; and his arms dropped to his sides: without knowledge of the direction they had taken; and without the craft to follow their tracks in the grass, in his helplessness he hovered on the brink of sheer madness. He was sharply called back to himself by the sound of a faint groan from the edge of the cut-bank. A tinge of gray had by this time been woven into the unrelieved blackness. Running toward the sound, he found a human form prone in the grass; and he saw it was a woman lying on her face. Grasping her shoulders, he rolled her over. It was Rina.
A tiny hope sprang in his breast. Here at last was a clue.
"Get up!" he said roughly.
She made no answer. From her limpness, and her cold, moist hands, Garth apprehended that she was physically sick. Partly raising her, he poured part of the contents of his flask down her throat. She choked, and turned her head away.
"Let me be!" she murmured. "Let me die!"
The wildness in Garth's veins subsided. Here he had something tangible to work upon; and his conscious brain resumed operations; prompting him at first like a small, strange voice at an immense distance.
"Tell me what happened!" he said hoarsely. "If they have wronged you, too, help me to find them, and we'll pay them off together!"