In the snow-walled defile they stood a moment, gazing upward at the glowing lights of Happy Camp and the stark outline of Chilcoot Mountain etched against a green night sky.
With a string of muffled imprecations Jose made a move as if to go back up the slope, but Blera put her hands on his shoulders and checked him.
“Don’t, Jose, don’t!” she besought. “They’ll maim and manhandle you till you’re a proper cripple. And the word’ll go round like a plague. There isn’t any tent there for us tonight.”
“I ain’t seein’ any here either, then,” snarled Jose. “You know how light we come over the Pass to make it in a day. Grub enough for one stop, and no blankets!”
“Well,” shivered Blera petulantly, “there’s lots of fire, isn’t there? What’s the use of lamenting in the frost?”
Happy Camp marked the edge of timber-line after the nakedness of the glacier-scoured rocks and volcanic slag about Crater Lake and the steeps above, and into the first scrubby pines Cantine and the woman turned.
Here was a chaos of dead and splintered trunks as thick as a man’s arm, and piling these up they kindled a giant fire. Food was lacking. Yet they melted snow in a drinking-cup that Cantine carried in his pocket and swallowed great drafts of hot water.
Blankets they were likewise powerless to improvise. They simply threw big heaps of green spruce boughs beside the fire and, lying upon them close to the coals, basked and drowsed, warming back and breast alternately in the terrific cold, and alternately rising to drag on fresh fuel.
Above them in the January night the aurora flashed and dimmed, and the sapphire stars leaped with dire prophecy of still intenser cold. And the January day, when it came, was as the night, except that the stars vanished and the aurora ceased to play. The jagged, sunless world was frigid, stiff and white, and the green night sky had changed to muddy gray.
Cantine and Blera arose early, drank more hot water and plowed down the ice-trail across Deep Lake and Long Lake, ancient volcano pits that with Crater linked Lake Linderman to the mountains.