To this Seagreave agreed, and after the sheriff had further relieved his feelings by some vitriolic comments upon Hanson, he granted him permission to look after the two cabins, and indifferently ordered the deputy in charge to go down the hill and get his breakfast at the hotel, remarking with rough humor that he'd leave Seagreave the prisoner of the mountain peaks and he guessed they'd keep him safe all right.
So the two men, their appetites sharpened by a night spent in searching for the fugitive, took their way down toward the village, and it was not long thereafter that Pearl, having secured permission to go up to the cabin and make some changes in her clothing, wearily climbed the hill. The lacks in her costume had been temporarily supplied by the inn-keeper's wife, but these makeshifts irked her fastidious spirit.
She had suggested that Mrs. Nitschkan and Mrs. Thomas go with her, but they were too thoroughly enjoying the limelight in which they found themselves to consider trudging up to their isolated cabin. Mrs. Thomas, in a pink glow of excitement, cooed and smiled and fluttered her lashes at half a dozen admirers, while Mrs. Nitschkan recounted to an interested group just where and how she had shot her bears.
"Say, have you took in the sheriff?" Mrs. Thomas found occasion to whisper to Mrs. Nitschkan. "He's an awful good looker, an' I think he got around that hall so stylish last night."
"What eyes he's got ain't for you," answered the gypsy cruelly. "He's kept his lamps steady on Pearl."
"That's all you know about it," returned Mrs. Thomas with some spirit. "He sat beside me at the table this morning and squeezed my hand twice when I passed him the flap-jacks. He's a real man, he is, an' likes a woman to be a woman, an' not a grizzly bear like you or a black panther like that Pearl."
Pearl's progress up the hill was necessarily slow. The wagons had cut the snow into great ruts which made walking difficult, and where it was smoother it was exceedingly slippery. But her weariness soon vanished under the stimulus of the fresh morning air. Even the exertion of dancing the evening before and the night of excitement which followed had left no trace. She was, indeed, a tireless creature and supple as a whalebone. So, after a few moments' exercise in the exhilaratingly pure air, the sparkle returned to her eye, the color to her cheek, and her step had regained its usual light buoyancy.
Although March had come with its thaws, there was no suggestion of spring in the landscape. From the white, monotonous expanse of snow rose bleak, skeleton shapes of trees lifting bare, black boughs to the snow-sodden clouds. Upon either side of the road lay a forest of desolation—varied only by the sad, dull green of the wind-blown pines—which stretched away and away until it became a mere blue shadow as unsubstantial as smoke on the mountain horizon; and yet spring, still invisible and to be denied by the doubting, was in the air, with all its soft intimations of bud and blossom and joyous life; and spring was in Pearl's heart as she hastened up the hill toward Seagreave. It brushed her cheek like a caress, it touched her lips like a song.
When she was about a quarter of a mile up from the village she crossed a little bridge which spanned a deep and narrow crevasse, a gash which cleft the great mountain to its foundation. Pearl lingered here a moment to rest, and, leaning her arms on the railing, looked down curiously into the mysterious depths so far below.
The white walls of the sharp, irregular declivity reflected many cold, prismatic lights, and down, far down where the eye could no longer distinguish shapes and outlines, there lay a shadow like steam from some vast, subterranean cauldron, blue, dense, impenetrable. It fascinated Pearl and she stood there trying to pierce the depths with her eye, until at last, recalled to herself by the chill in the wind, she again turned and hastened up the hill. But before seeking Seagreave and asking him to share his breakfast with her, she followed the instincts of her inherent and ineradicable coquetry and, stopping at her father's cabin, made a toilet, slipping into one of her own gowns and rearranging her hair. Then, throwing a long cape about her and adjusting her mantilla, she closed the door behind her and turned into the narrow trail which led at sharp right angles to the road to Saint Harry's cabin. It was, Pearl reflected, almost like walking through the tunnel of a mine; the snow walls on either side of her were as high as her head. Occasionally the green fringes of a pine branch tapped her cheek sharply with their rusty needles. Then the tunnel widened to a little clearing where stood the cabin, picturesque with the lichened bark of the trees on the rough-hewn logs.