The huge dark mass balanced itself one moment, more, then measuring its prey rushed through the air towards him. But, ere it had seized him, a shot flashed through the shadows, and rang through the silence; the bird dropped dead in a ring of blood on the naked stone of the mountain side.
Bela sprang up, and tottering on the slippery shelving rock threw his arms outward with a loud cry.
'I came to find you!' he shouted, in his rapturous joy; then cold and fatigue and past terror conquered him. He swooned at his father's feet.
Sabran had not known that it was his son whom he saved. He had seen a child menaced by a bird of prey, and so had fired. When the boy staggered to him with that cry of welcome, he was for the moment stunned with amazement and gratitude and inexpressible emotion; the next he raised the little brave body in his arms.
'Oh! tell me where your mother kissed you last, that I may set my lips there!' he murmured to the child: but Bela heard not.
He was cold, inanimate, and senseless. He had gained his goal, but he had no sight or sense to know it. His father looked around him with terror for his sake. The snow had begun to fall, the darkness was deepening, the mists were creeping upward; he, who for three years had dwelt a mountaineer amidst these mountains, knew the danger of being belated amidst them in autumn, when, at a stroke, autumn became winter; sometimes in a single night. He himself had his dwelling far from there upon the Isel water, under the Umbal glacier. If he had to carry the boy it would be useless to dream of reaching the rude place which he had made his home: the weight of a tall child of ten years old is no light burden, and he knew that even if Bela regained his consciousness he would be incapable of exertion in the cold, which would intensify with every hour. But he wasted no moments in hesitation. He knew what the white fall of those softly-descending feathers from above, what the darkness and wetness of the dense fog down below, meant, out on the spurs of Glöckner after sunset. Lives were lost here every year; herds that had stayed on the Alps too late were surprised and destroyed by early snow-storms; pedlars and carriers were belated, and sent to a last sleep by that sudden plunge of autumn into frost. He knew his way inch by inch, and he knew that there was, some mile or so beyond him, the Wandahutte, erected in a dangerous pass by his wife, as a thanksgiving in the first months of their marriage. There he would find a rude bed, food, wine, and shelter for the night. He set himself to reach it.
It was hard to climb with the child, held by one arm, and thrown across one shoulder, as shepherds throw a disabled lamb. His other hand gripped his alpenstock; he had left his rifle under a ledge of rock, as a useless load. He had stripped off the hunter's jacket that he wore, and wrapped it round Bela, whose body and limbs felt frozen. Down below in the valleys fruit trees had still their plums and pears, and asters and dahlias still flowered, but at this elevation the cold was piercing and the snow froze as it fell.
A high wind also had risen, as the day declined, and blew the white powder of the snow in whirling clouds: the terrible tourmente of the Alps which every traveller dreads. In the confusion of it he knew that he might walk round and round on the same road all night, making no progress. Soon it grew dark, though not quite four o'clock. He had no light with him, for he had not intended to be out at night; he had but come thither, as he often came, to see the distant gleam of the Szalrassee, the far-off outline of the Hohenszalrasburg. He had been reascending and returning when he had seen a child menaced by an eagle, and had fired. Had he been by himself he would have found the hut speedily, but weighted with the burden of Bela's inert body he made little way, and staggered often on the slippery frozen steep. He had no hands free to wield his hatchet and cut his way by steps over the ice which had formed in all the fissures of the rocks.
The mountains had been his only friends in his exile. He had returned to them, he had dwelt amongst them, he had borne his sorrows through their help, and strengthened himself with their strength. But they menaced him sorely now. For himself he cared not, but his heart ached for the child, whose courage and affection had brought him thither to meet his death.
'My poor Bela!' he murmured, as the boy's fair head hung over his shoulder, 'why did you come to me? I give you nothing but evil. Safety, comfort, happiness, honour, all come from her.'