"And right on the course!" Garth sang. "How did you keep it?"
"When the snow hid your tracks—I remembered—to keep the wind on my right cheek," he murmured.
That was the last Garth could get out of him. He was presently alarmed to find the boy growing increasingly numb and drowsy; even he knew what this portended in the North. He pulled him out of the saddle; and made him walk; supporting him with one arm, while with the other he led the horse. The animal took advantage of his partial helplessness, to plant his legs and pull back anew. If there was ever an excuse for anger against a dumb beast, surely hard-pressed Garth had it then. The horse was crazed with exhaustion, and terror of the storm; and tugs and kicks were of no avail. Garth could not bring in both boy and horse by main strength; and in the end, with hearty curses, he was obliged to abandon the beast to his fate.
Garth, pulling his hat over his eyes, and drawing the boy's arm across his shoulders, doggedly pushed into the storm. He thus half supported, half dragged his companion, who was, nevertheless, compelled to use his own legs. Charley never spoke except now and then to beg drowsily to be let alone. In Garth's flask was about a gill of precious stimulant, and, when the boy's legs failed him, he doled it out in sips.
They had at least nine miles to cover—and only two hours of daylight left. Try as he would to banish it, the sense of nine miles' distance would roll itself interminably out before Garth's mind's eye. Nine miles into two hours—the sum had no answer. Afterward night and storm on the empty prairie—what was the use? But when he reached this point, he would grit his teeth and take a fresh hold of the boy. If he had any other defined thought besides this painful round, it was to thank God that he was strong; he needed every ounce of it now.
Instead of attempting to pick up his own trail—surely obscured by now in the snow—he shaped his course northwest, trusting to strike the coulée at its nearest point, and travel down until he hit the mark he had set up. It was a little longer so; but the result justified it, for there was some shelter in the coulée; and working down the bottom, they could not miss the mark.
It was half-past four by Garth's watch when they laboriously climbed up the other side; and set their course by compass again for Rina's camp. It grew colder hourly; and the snowflakes became as hard and sharp as grains of coarse powder. Charley was kept going automatically by frequent small doses of the spirit from the flask. Garth dared not spare any of it for himself. It soon began to grow dark; and long before Garth could hope they had nearly covered the distance between the two coulées, it became totally dark; and he could no longer read the face of his compass. Fortunately the wind held steady from the north; he struggled ahead, keeping it on his right cheek as Charley had done before him.
Garth's head became confused; he was no longer sensible of the passage of time. Only his will kept his legs at their work. Drowsiness crept over him; and with it a growing sense of the uselessness of struggling further. He fought it for a while, but with subsiding energy. His knees began to weaken under him; he sank down. With a desperate effort, he struggled up again; and won another painful hundred yards. He was falling again—and this time he did not care—when suddenly the ground fell away from under his feet, he pitched forward, and he and the boy rolled down a steep declivity together.
Garth instantly knew they had reached the second coulée; and the thought cleared his fogged senses like the draught from his flask which he could not spare himself. He poured the last drops between Charley's numb lips; and turned to the right over the stony bed of the watercourse. He remembered Charley had strayed far to the left of his true course when guiding himself by the wind; and he had also observed in himself a tendency to swerve to that side, when working by compass. So he was sure they were somewhere above the poplar bluff—how far he dared not guess.
He was right. Utterly worn out by a seeming interminable struggle through the drifts in the bottom of the coulée, at last a misty, pinkish aura blushed in the snowy night. It was Rina's fire—warmth and shelter! and before it a little animal was roasting on a spit. Garth's senses slipped away in rapture at the smell it sent forth.