Slipping his feet from the straps of his skis, he staggered past them and they saw that he was carrying a woman in his arms.
CHAPTER III
“Shut the door,” Hugh whispered, and laid his burden down on a big black bear-hide near the stove. He knelt beside it. He had no eyes for anything else. Pete, hobbling to him, gazed curiously down, and Bella knelt opposite and drew away Hugh’s mackinaw coat, with which he had wrapped his trove. It was not a woman whom they looked down upon, but a girl, and very young—perhaps not yet seventeen—a girl with cropped dark curly hair and a face so wan and blue and at the same time so scorched by the snow-glare that its exquisiteness of feature was all the more marked. Hugh’s handkerchief was tied loosely across her eyes.
“I heard her crying in the snow,” he said with ineffable tenderness; “crying like a little bleating lamb with cold and pain and hunger and fright—the most pitiful thing in God’s cruel trap of life. She’s blind—snow-blind.”
Pete gave a sharp exclamation, and Bella gently removed the handkerchief. The small figure moaned and moved its head. The lids of her eyes were swollen and discolored.
“Snow-blind,” echoed Bella.
“A bad case,” said Hugh. “Get her some soup, Bella, and—perhaps, hot water—I don’t know.” He looked up helplessly.
Bella went to the kitchen. She had regained her old look of dumbness. Beside the figure on the floor Pete touched one of the girl’s small clenched hands. It was like ice. At the touch she moaned, and Hugh ordered sharply: “Let her alone.” So the boy dragged himself up again and stood by the mantel, watching Hugh with puzzled and wondering eyes.
“Think what she’s been through,” Hugh murmured, “that little delicate thing, wandering for two days, out in this cold—scared by the woods, blinded by the pain, starving. When I found her, you’d have thought she’d be afraid of a wild man like me, but she just lifted up her arms like a baby and dropped her head on my shoulder. She—she patted my cheek—”