My strength felt inexhaustible and the quicksilver in my bones drove me forward. The snow was still falling, but the wind was dying down, and after the inferno of the pass it was like summer. The road wound over the shale of the hillside and then into what in spring must have been upland meadows. Then it ran among trees, and far below me on the right I could hear the glacier river churning in its gorge. Soon little empty huts appeared, and rough enclosed paddocks, and presently I came out on a shelf above the stream and smelt the wood-smoke of a human habitation.
I found a middle-aged peasant in the cottage, a guide by profession in summer and a woodcutter in winter.
“I have brought my Herr from Santa Chiara,” I said, “over the Schwarzsteinthor. He is very weary and must sleep.”
I decanted Wake into a chair, and his head nodded on his chest. But his colour was better.
“You and your Herr are fools,” said the man gruffly, but not unkindly. “He must sleep or he will have a fever. The Schwarzsteinthor in this devil’s weather! Is he English?”
“Yes,” I said, “like all madmen. But he’s a good Herr, and a brave mountaineer.”
We stripped Wake of his Red Cross uniform, now a collection of sopping rags, and got him between blankets with a huge earthenware bottle of hot water at his feet. The woodcutter’s wife boiled milk, and this, with a little brandy added, we made him drink. I was quite easy in my mind about him, for I had seen this condition before. In the morning he would be as stiff as a poker, but recovered.
“Now I’m off for St Anton,” I said. “I must get there tonight.”
“You are the hardy one,” the man laughed. “I will show you the quick road to Grünewald, where is the railway. With good fortune you may get the last train.”
I gave him fifty francs on my Herr’s behalf, learned his directions for the road, and set off after a draught of goat’s milk, munching my last slab of chocolate. I was still strung up to a mechanical activity, and I ran every inch of the three miles to the Staubthal without consciousness of fatigue. I was twenty minutes too soon for the train, and, as I sat on a bench on the platform, my energy suddenly ebbed away. That is what happens after a great exertion. I longed to sleep, and when the train arrived I crawled into a carriage like a man with a stroke. There seemed to be no force left in my limbs. I realised that I was leg-weary, which is a thing you see sometimes with horses, but not often with men.