The first step of course was to rid himself of his wife. She stood as one dazed, her eyes fixed upon him, but unseeingly. She seemed to be taking no notice, but he knew well enough that if he should move she would follow him. What he wanted was to prevent her from seeing, unprepared, that which he might find: to get her away to some sheltered place where there were other women. Knowing instinctively the value of domination to one in her condition he laid his hand on her shoulder and ordered her as if she were a child.
“Listen, Sue,” he said peremptorily; “I’ve got to have help, an’ have it damned quick. You must run like a wild turkey over to Rice’s an’ rouse up men an’ dogs an’ start ’em arter me. They kin ketch up my trail from here. I’ve got to shove on at once. It’s the boy’s best chance.”
Hope and life sprang like a flame to Sue’s face. “Air thar any chance?” she demanded.
“Yes, if you’ll help me,” Tom answered, feeling drearily confident that he was lying, but keeping on all the same. “B’ars have been knowed to play with babies, like cubs, an’ never hurt a ha’r o’ ’em. Now, travel like lightenin’!”
Sue pressed herself close to him and held his lips with a brief kiss. “If the child’s dead ye must kill me,” she muttered, and, before he could answer, fled away from him through the night.
How she got over to Rice’s Sue Westley could never describe. In her mind was a confused jumble of forest and hillside which seemed to cut her off from everywhere, and of a sinuous trail to which she held by instinct, catching her garments on the bushes as she ran, stumbling, falling, cutting her hands and bruising her body against broken ice and unexpected up-juttings of granite. Her sun-bonnet caught on a low-hanging bough and was jerked from her head, but she sped on unheeding; her abundant blond hair shook from its coil and lay along her back like a half-twisted rope. At last she won free of the woods and tumbled, rather than climbed, over the rail fence surrounding Rice’s clearing, and raced in among the revellers with her face white as chalk and her breath coming and going in gasps.
They could make nothing of her story, at first, until Rice, a man gifted with common sense, got her into a chair and made her swallow half a tumbler of hot whiskey toddy. As the liquor got in its work her nerves steadied and she was able to make them understand the situation and the necessity there was for haste. Comment and question circulated like lightning and excitement rose to fever heat. Bears, hunger-driven from the heights, were known to be rambling about, so that the situation held grim possibilities. It seemed probable that this very animal had had the Westley pig-pen for his objective point and that he had just up-reared himself to climb the fence when the woman appeared and thrust her baby under his nose. All thought of jollification vanished like mist and every able-bodied man in the crowd grabbed for his gun and whooped up the hounds.
Tom, meanwhile, followed the dents in the snow-crust, thankful for his own forethought in providing himself with a lantern. The moon would be up after a little, but in the urgent present the necessity for light was overwhelming. The trail led him through a jungly hollow and across a long ridge into another hollow. Here some clearing for firewood had been made and the trees were scattered at long intervals, with stumps and brush heaps between, transformed by a mantling of snow into strange similitudes.