“What indeed?” said Gordon Duncan, a look of despair coming over his face.
Had Faye chanced to have wakened from her sound sleep of the previous night at a time shortly after one in the morning; had the moonlight been bright enough and her glass strong enough to enable her to see clearly for the distance of a mile, she might have witnessed as strange a drama as ever was played upon the white stage of the North. As it was, only the eye of the All-Seeing One witnessed that which passed at the end of the great snow pile created by the avalanche Johnny Longbow’s foot had loosened.
By some strange bit of Providence the boy was not buried by the avalanche that had carried him down. He was struck on the head by a block of hard packed snow ice, and rendered unconscious. After that he was pitched and tumbled, knocked, bumped and beaten until his body was a mass of bruises. He was left at last, still unconscious and half dead, at the foot of the now silent, inanimate avalanche that had been his undoing.
At this hour two figures, approaching from opposite directions, came near to the unconscious boy. One was a great gaunt brown beast. The other, a short, squat, powerful figure, might at a moment’s notice have puzzled a skilled man of science. Was he man or beast? Was he an Indian of these wilds, or was he some giant ape escaped from captivity?
He wore clothes. This marked him for a man.
Truth was, the creature was a man. Yet so bent and twisted was his body, so bowed his crooked legs, so ugly and distorted his visage that one might have traveled America from end to end without meeting with another being such as he.
As his small eyes caught sight of the unconscious boy, they gleamed like twin stars. Johnny’s stout hand still gripped his bow. This strong bow was a prize in any land. How much more in a wilderness! Not less valuable was the quiver of arrows that lay nearby. And if he were dead? But then, too often in wild lands it matters little that one is not dead. If he were to be found helpless, this is enough to excuse robbery.
The curious deformed creature was bending over the boy when of a sudden his alert ear caught some slight sound, a scraping perhaps, or a sniffing breath. Looking up quickly, he found himself staring into the burning eyes of a great gaunt bear which had, beyond doubt, been disturbed from his hibernating sleep by the thundering avalanche.
Some form of grizzly, a silver-tip perhaps, this bear promised to be a formidable foe. At such a time of half stupor and intense hunger he must be doubly dangerous.
The Indian took one step backward. Then he paused. The next instant, with hands that were as powerful as man has known, and fingers as cunning, he wrenched the bow from the unconscious boy’s grasp and sent an arrow crashing into the gaunt beast’s side.