But there was no answer. For a moment man and wife stared each other in the eye; then, moved by a common impulse, they walked into the kitchen. There, on the table, lay the half of a fresh-cut side of bacon; the bread-box was open and a crusty loaf missing; the girl’s shawl was gone from its peg and her overshoes from their corner.
“Good God!” gasped the settler. “The child’s gone after him!”
They knew the risk. All the morning the storm had been brewing, and now it thundered by, a veritable blizzard. The blizzard! King of storms! It compels the settler to string a wire from house to stables, it sets men to circling in the snow, it catches little children coming home from school and buries them in its monstrous drifts.
Without another word Sterling wound a scarf about his neck, grabbed his badger mitts, and rushed outside.
When Avis softly closed the kitchen door she could just see Batiste rounding a bluff that lay a furlong west of her father’s stables. She started after him; but by the time she had covered half the distance a sea of white swept in between and blotted him from view.
She struggled on, and on, and still on, until, in spite of the seventy degrees of frost, the perspiration burst from every pore and the scud melted on her glowing face. This was well enough—so long as she kept moving; but when the time came that she must stop, she would freeze all the quicker for her present warmth.
This, being born and bred of the prairie, Avis knew, and the knowledge kept her toiling, toiling on, until her tired legs and leaden feet compelled a pause in the shelter of a bluff. She was hungry, too. All this time she carried the bread and meat, and now, unconscious of a pair of slant eyes which glared from a willow thicket, she broke the loaf and began to eat. While she ate, the green lights in the eyes flared brighter, a long red tongue licked the drool from grinning jaws, and forth from his covert stole a lank, gray wolf.
Avis uttered a startled cry. This was no coyote, to be chased with a stick, but a wolf of timber stock, a great beast, heavy, prick-eared, strong as a mastiff. His nose puckered in a wicked snarl as he slunk in half-circles across her front. He was undecided. So, while he circled, trying to make up his mind, drawing a little nearer at every turn, Avis fell back—back towards the bluff, keeping her white face always to the creeping beast.
It was a small bluff, lacking a tree large enough to climb, but sufficient for her purpose. On its edge she paused, threw the bacon to the wolf, and then ran desperately. Once clear of the scrub, she ran on, plunging through drifts, stumbling, falling, to rise again and push her flight. Of direction she took no heed; her only thought was to place distance between herself and the red-mouthed brute. But when, weary and breathless, she paused for rest, out of the drab drift stole the lank, gray shadow.
The brute crouched a few yards away, licking his sinful lips, winking his devil eyes. She still had the loaf. As she threw it, the wolf sprang and snapped it in mid-air. Then she ran, and ran, and ran, as the tired doe runs from the hounds. For what seemed to her an interminable time, though it was less than five minutes, she held on; then stopped, spent, unable to take another step. Looking back, she saw nothing of the wolf; but just when she began to move slowly forward, thinking he had given up the chase, a gray shape loomed right ahead.