He felt in all his pockets. “That’s right,” he said. “All my matches are gone, and my pistol and ammunition—but they’ve left my cigarettes. Without a single match, confound them! But what if I had struck right out and happened on the right way? That would have upset their calculations, I imagine.”
“The snow is deep; to your hips, in places—and deeper. Even if you happened on the right way, and happened to keep it in this storm—which could not be—you would have no chance. Weak, and without help, and without a fire to rest by! You could not travel half of seven miles. But I have matches; and I know the way. I can help you.”
“I need help, heaven knows!” he said. “And I’m glad it is you.”
After a silence of several seconds she replied, “I’m glad, too.”
She left him, gathered some old boughs from a bunk, tore strips of bark from the logs of the wall and made a fire on the rough hearth. She tore poles from the fallen patch of roof, broke the smaller of them, and fed them to the fire. She helped him over to a corner near the hearth and gave him a match for his cigarette. She had plenty of matches, a large jack-knife and hairpins in her pockets.
“I can stand a lot of this,” said Vane. “The men who thought they could kill me this way are fools.”
Joe searched about the hut, found a rusty tin kettle at last and went out into the spinning snow. Vane felt a chill, whether physical or spiritual he did not know, the moment the warped door closed between them. He got to his feet, moved unsteadily and painfully to the door and pulled it open. He saw her through the veils of the snow descending the cleared slope before the hut and watched the slender figure until it melted into a dark screen of alders. His legs and arms ached; his ribs and head were sore; and his throat ached and his lips were parched; but his heart was elated.
She returned with the kettle full of chips of ice which she had hacked from the surface of the brook with her knife. She melted this at the fire and cooled it in the heap of snow under the break in the roof. They drank it together, turn and turn about. Vane felt much better for it.
“It’s queer to think that you wasted all that game with your ankle,” he said. “All that effort to make me promise to run away—all that successful effort—thrown away!”
“And worse than thrown away,” she answered. “If I hadn’t done that perhaps you would not have been ambushed.”