"This is my watch, you know. I cannot leave this house. But I don't think there will be a snow-slide. Things do not happen so simply as that. You don't know what I mean? But think a moment. You know, do you not, who I am? Should you think really that death is a thing that any friend of mine would wish to save me from? Life is what I am afraid of—long life to the end. I don't think there will be a snow-slide, not in time for me. But I thank you so much. You have made me feel so human—so like other people. You don't understand that, either? Well, no matter. I am just as grateful. I shall remember your visit all my life; and even if I live long, I doubt if I shall ever have a kinder visitor. I am much better for your coming, though you may think you have come for nothing. Now you must go before it gets too dark. You will go to the Mule Deer, will you not, and carry this same message to—there?"
"I'm goin' to stop right here till Jack Waring gets back."
"Oh, no, you're not. You are going this instant." She rose, and held out her hand. She had that power over him that one so much in earnest as she will always have over one who is amazed and in doubt.
"Won't you shake hands with me?" Her thrilling voice made a sort of music of the common words.
He took her hand, and wagged it clumsily in a dazed way, and she almost pushed him out of the house.
"Well, I'll be hanged if that ain't the meanest trick since I was born—to leave a little lone woman watchin' with a dead man in a cabin, with snow-slides startin' all over the mountains! What's the matter with me, anyhow? Seem to be knocked silly with her blamed queer talk. Heap of sense in it, too. Wouldn't think one of her kind would see it that way, though. Durned if I know which kind she is. B'lieve I'll go back now. Why, Lord! I must go back! What'll I say to Jim?"
David Bruce had gained the top of the road leading away from the mine before he came to himself in a burst of unconscious profanity. He could hear the howling of the wind around the horn of the peak. He looked up and down, and considered a second.
In another second it was too late—too late to add his life to hers, that instant buried beneath the avalanche.
A stroke out of a clear sky; a roar that filled the air; a burst of light snow mounting over the tree-tops like steam condensed above a rushing train; a concussion of wind that felled trees in the valley a hundred yards from the spot where the plunging mass shot down—then the chinook eddied back, across the track of the snow-slide, and went storming up the peak.