He took up his prospecting tools and walked a few yards along the ledge. Charron did not at first follow him, Rainger waited, and at last the other joined him. The younger man, still in a flushed dream, was gazing at something that lay in the palm of his hand. This, with a boyish impulse, he held out to Rainger.
“Look, Jack,” he said, softly. Rainger looked. It was a silver hairpin—a little prong of metal headed with a silver ball, carved like a fourfold flower.
“Maisie’s,” went on Charron, almost in a whisper. “D’you remember that last night when you’d been out to Weston to say good-bye to Laure, and you came on with the outfit in a cab to pick me up at the house in Cedar Street, where I’d been saying good-bye to my Maisie? I remember. You came in, and you found us all in the sitting-room, and Maisie’s mother was teasing her because I’d knocked her hair down. Such pretty hair! It came down because she’d given me this out of it. She had two in, and she gave me one,—warm from her hair, Jack. Later on the rest of it came down; she’d lost the other pin. I begged her to let it stay down, d’you remember? She made a face at me, and she said: ‘I can’t stick it up now the other hairpin’s lost. P’raps I’ve given that to someone else, you old silly!’ And—and then the evening was gone, and there was nothing left of it all but this silver hairpin.” He slipped it back into his inner pocket. “Well, I’m a selfish fool, Jack, but I can’t stop thinking of her. Come on, and we’ll have flapjacks with rum in ’em, and perhaps the gods’ll decide for us.”
They turned in silence down the windy ledges towards the little log-built shanty, that for two years they had called home. And as they went, each saw a face drawn upon the lovely dusk. To those faces their hearts turned with the devouring longing born of uttermost solitude; no man knowing them, could have said which heart yearned the more strongly to its goal. Charron walked with a frowning face, his big fingers clenched upon the little silver pin. Rainger had his face raised; his eyes sought the first star, and rested there.
No human eyes saw them, none awaited them, none expected them; but on the high ridges ahead a watcher rose suddenly to his delicate hooves, shook his great curved horns to the wind, and fled away like a shadow. They had been seen of the mountain sheep; and as the leader wheeled, he loosened a broad stone, which slid, and rested, and slid a little farther. There it gathered to itself a shower of pebbles, bright as roving stars, quartz pebbles, and damp snow; and shifted again, and hung quivering.
Rainger was ten yards ahead when the roar came from the heights immediately above them. And Charron cried out and leapt forward; but if he had gone on wings he would have been too late. The mountain spouted death at them. He saw the snow-slide pouring fluid as foam, eddying like cloud, yet whirling the lesser boulders with it, and tearing the young spruce trees from their hold. Then the fringe of wind and stones and whirling snow-clots caught him and struck him aside, as if he had been a straw; he was bruised, blinded, beaten to his knees, to his face. He rolled instinctively to the inner side of the ledge, and lay huddled there, without feeling, without thought, almost without sense. Only when silence, save for a dying thunder of reverberant echoes, brought strength again to bruised mind and body, he struggled to his feet, his clothes in rags, as if he had been fighting a pack of dogs, and staggered forward, crying to Rainger.
He had no thought that he would find his friend. For the mountain-side was swept as if a vast broom had passed down it. He crawled to the lip of the ledge where it over-hung the sheer abyss. He was sobbing as he looked over; for the hardships and sacrifice of those two iron years had bound him to Rainger, and Rainger to him, in a more than brotherly love. And there, not twenty feet beneath him, he saw Rainger’s body resting against a shattered balsam, draggled as if a tide had swept it, and motionless.
“Jack! Jack! can you hear? I’m coming to you, chum!”
He thought the figure stirred faintly. He was not sure. He looked round desperately for help.
But,—shaken, battered as he was,—all help must come from him. He summoned his reeling will to govern that rebellious brute, the reeling body. He had a thin rope coiled round his waist, which they had used in some of their perilous short-cuts from the claim to the cabin below; he unwound it, the mountains spinning about him in wheels of blue and white and violet as he did so. He was almost afraid to draw breath lest he should start another slide, and the helpless man beneath him be dashed away; but in that event, they would both go . . . . He found a stump which would bear the rope. He was panting all the time: “Jack! Hold on, Jack. I’m coming to you.” There was no response. He wondered, as he lowered himself, scrambling down the steep beneath the ledge, if he would find his friend dead. He couldn’t realize life, somehow, with old Jack out of it . . . .