Then came darkness.
III
It was a darkness glittering with stars. Such stars as the men of the South, the men of the cities, never see. Each was a blazing world hung in nothingness, rayed with sapphire and rose. Now and then the white ice-blink ran over and died beyond them in the spaces where even stars were not. Desmond was lying on his back, staring at them through a cranny in his sleeping-bag. He knew where he was, yet in his brain was a sort of cold confusion. He seemed to hear Forbes speaking.
“Will ye stay here with me and rest—I’m all but blind the day—or will ye go into Fort Recompense with Jooney here and the dogs, and put the dust in safety? Or will ye try the short cut across the pass with Ohlsen?”
“And here I am, half-way to the fort, and sleeping out with Jooney and the dogs,” Desmond muttered; “but I can’t remember coming.”
Yet, as he turned in his sleeping-bag, his knowledge of his whereabouts was exact. He was in a stony little gully beyond Fachette, where high banks cut off the wind and ground willows gave firing. The huskies were asleep and warm in deep drift under the bank, after a full meal of dried salmon.
“I’ll say this for young Jooney,” said Desmond, drowsily, “he’s got some sense with dogs.”
Lajeune was beside him, asleep in another bag. Between them was the pack of gold and the sledge harness. And the great plain, he knew, ran north and south of the very lip of the gully, silver under the stars, ridged and rippled by the wind, like white sand of the sea. The wind was now still. The earth was again a star, bright, silent, and alone, akin to her sisters of the infinite heavens.
“There ain’t so much gold in a place like this here,” Desmond whispered, resentfully, to the night, “but jest you wait till I get south-east again.” He was filled with blind longing for red brick, asphalt, and crowded streets; even the hens and ducklings were not enough. He hungered in this splendour of desolation for the little tumults of mankind. It seemed as if the stars laughed.
“There ain’t nothing my gold won’t get me,” said Desmond more loudly. His breath hung in little icicles on the edges of his spy-hole. It was cruelly cold. He drew his hood closer round his head, and thrust it out of the bag.