“But they're steep as the dickens, with stone walls, and—”
Seabury cut short his protests by buttoning his collar tightly about his throat and testing the laces of his shoes. He was afraid to delay lest his resolution should break down.
“I'm going,” he stated stubbornly; “and the sooner I get off, the better.”
And go he did, with a curt farewell which astonished and bewildered his companion who had no means of knowing that it was a manner assumed to hide a desperate fear and nervousness. As the door closed between them, Seabury's lips began to tremble; and his hands shook so that he could scarcely tighten up the straps of his skees.
Back of the cabin, poised at the top of the slope, with the snow whirling around him and the unknown in front, he had one horrible moment of indecision when his heart lay like lead within him and he was on the verge of turning back. But with a tremendous effort he crushed down that almost irresistible impulse. He could not bear the thought of facing Hedges, an acknowledged coward and a quitter. An instant later a thrust of his staff sent him over the edge, to glide downward through the trees with swiftly increasing momentum.
Strangely enough, he felt somehow that the worst was over. To begin with, he was much too occupied to think of danger, and after he had successfully steered through the first hundred feet or so of woods, a growing confidence in himself helped to bolster up his shrinking spirit. After all, save for the blinding snow, this was no worse than some of the descents he had made of wooded slopes back there at home. If the storm did not increase, he believed that he could make it.
At first he managed, by a skilful use of his staff, to hold himself back a little and keep his speed within a reasonable limit. But just before he left the woods, the necessity for a sudden side-turn to avoid a clump of trees through which he could not pass nearly flung him off his balance. In struggling to recover it, the end of his staff struck against another tree and was torn instantly from his grasp.
His heart leaped, then sank sickeningly, but there was no stopping now. A moment later he flashed out into the open, swerved through a gap in the rough, snow-covered wall, and shot down the steep incline with swiftly increasing speed.
His body tense and bent slightly forward, his straining gaze set unwaveringly ahead, striving to pierce the whirling, beating snow, Seabury felt as if he were flying through the clouds. On a clear day, with the ability to see what lay before him, there would have been a rather delightful exhilaration in that descent. But the perilous uncertainty of it all kept the boy's heart in his throat and chained him in a rigid grip of cold fear.
Long before he expected it, the rounded, snow-covered bulk of a second wall seemed to leap out of the blinding snow-curtain and rush toward him. Almost too late, he jumped, and, soaring through the air, struck the declining slope again a good thirty feet beyond.