That journey through the frozen forest was difficult and terrible. He was forced to halt occasionally to rest himself, and always he built a little fire that he might not take cold while his overworked and trembling muscles were relaxed. He labored on all that night and all the next day, without stopping more than half an hour at a time. When there were yet five miles between him and the great spring that Tot had named "The Lake of Peace," he became utterly exhausted; the physical machine that was him was fine, but it had reached the limit of its endurance.
Since it was not humanly possible for him to go farther without rest and sleep, he made a fire in a sheltered spot and put on wood that would last for hours. This done, he fashioned himself a thin couch of laurel branches, collapsed upon it, and at once was wrapped in a slumber so deep that it was akin to death itself. But vague dreams tormented him when the first keen edge of his exhaustion was worn off; he heard Tot calling to him again and again, and he awoke in a fever of anxiety while it was yet night. He sat up stiffly. He had to go!
When he had eaten the last of the food that his wife had prepared for him, he took up his brushwood crutch and set out to the northward once more. He strove hard to make himself believe that Tot had been neither outwitted nor deceived by the foxlike and dastardly Mayfield. But the fear would not be driven away.
The middle of the afternoon had come when at last he reached the open space that lay around the head of Doe River. His heart ached with apprehension because Tot did not come out to meet him. He opened his lips to call and couldn't speak her name. Fear had made him dumb.
XXII
Wolfe crumpled on the icy doorstep. With the palm of one of his half frozen hands he beat against the door. The only answer he had was the dull rattle of the wooden latch. He struggled upward, seized the coonhide latch-string, and gave it a nervous jerk. The door creaked slowly inward. There was no person in the cabin. Wolfe entered on his hands and knees, reached a crude chair beside the hearth, and drew himself into it with difficulty.
A fire burned brightly in the wide stone fireplace, and in a corner of the room lay a little heap of wood with particles of snow still clinging to it; the cabin had not long been deserted, certainly. After he had rested for a few minutes, Wolfe went first to the door at the rear and then to the door at the front, and looked for his wife's footprints in the snow outside. He recognized only the footprints of Cat-Eye Mayfield and himself.
More anxious than ever, he leaned weakly against the jamb, put his cupped hands to his mouth, and shouted.