He could make no answer to that, with her beautiful eyes looking at him as they were, but he felt his heart grow warmer and something rise up chokingly in his throat.
“Sokwenna is dead, and Rossland lies out there—shot under a flag of truce,” he said. “We can’t have many minutes left to us.”
He was looking at the square of light where the tunnel from the cellar-pit opened into the ravine. He had planned to escape through it—alone—and keep up a fight in the open, but with Mary at his side it would be a desperate gantlet to run.
“Where are Keok and Nawadlook?” he asked.
“On the tundra, hurrying for the mountains. I told them it was your plan that I should return to you. When they doubted, I threatened to give myself up unless they did as I commanded them. And—Alan—the ravine is filled with the rain-mist, and dark—” She was holding his free hand closely to her breast.
“It is our one chance,” he said.
“And aren’t you glad—a little glad—that I didn’t run away without you?”
Even then he saw the sweet and tremulous play of her lips as they smiled at him in the gloom, and heard the soft note in her voice that was almost playfully chiding; and the glory of her love as she had proved it to him there drew from him what he knew to be the truth.
“Yes—I am glad. It is strange that I should be so happy in a moment like this. If they will give us a quarter of an hour—”
He led the way quickly to the square of light and was first to creep forth into the thick mist. It was scarcely rain, yet he could feel the wet particles of it, and through this saturated gloom whining bullets cut like knives over his head. The blazing cabin illumined the open on each side of Sokwenna’s place, but deepened the shadows in the ravine, and a few seconds later they stood hand in hand in the blanket of fog that hid the coulée.