The roaring of the wind, the surge of the torrential river, and, worst of all, the trees that were now crashing down, might have bewildered the steadiest head not trained to the winter savagery of the wilderness. A single tree across the road ahead might have meant disaster. Except for the little stone hut of Adrian Wilder, placed purposely to secure as great isolation as possible, and invisible from the road, there was no shelter within miles of the spot.
Presently the catastrophe came. The man, evidently seeing just ahead a tree that was swinging to its fall, shouted to the horses, and laid on the whip with added vigor, aiming to pass before the tree should fall. The horses, wholly beside themselves with terror, reared, and then plunged forward; but a moment had been lost. The horses and wagon passed under the falling tree just in time to be crushed and buried under it. The thunder of the fall echoed above the roar of the wind and the crash of more distant falling trees. Nothing of the four living things that had passed under the trap remained to Wilder’s view; they had been as completely blotted out as though they had never filled a place in the great aching world.
CHAPTER TWO
FOR a moment the young man gazed in a stupid hope that the impossible would happen,—that horses, wagon, man, and woman would emerge and continue their mad flight down the canon. Then, so completely and suddenly had all this life and activity Ceased, he wondered if the old anguish that had driven him to the solitude of the mountains was now tricking an abnormal imagination and weaving phantasms out of the storm, to torture him a moment with breathless dread, and then suppress themselves in the seeming of a tragic death. He remembered the warnings of Dr. Malbone,—he must close his mind upon the past, must find in the present only the light with which the world is filled, and must aim for a sane and useful future.
All this consumed but a moment. At once there burst upon him the awful reality of the tragedy that had worked itself out so logically before him. Humanity cried aloud within him. He sprang toward his hut, procured an axe, and plunged down the slope of the talus, taking no heed of the crude but surer trail that he had made from the road to his hut. He slipped, fell, gathered himself up, fell again, but rapidly neared his goal.
He paused when he had reached the prostrate tree. Through the branches his peering revealed a crushed, still heap. He pushed his head and shoulders within and called. There was no response.
He was at the rear of the wagon, and soon saw that it had been crushed into an indeterminate mass of wood and iron. By pushing apart the more yielding branches he brought to view the up-turned face of the man, whose eyes, fixed in death, stared horribly from a head curiously and grotesquely unshaped by the crush of the branches. The young man drew back. He gasped for breath; he called upon his self-command to bear him up in this strenuous time. He attacked the branches with his axe and cleared them away. He half wondered that the eyes of the dead remained open while they filled with particles of the bark riven by the axe. Presently the body came within reach. With unspeakable repulsion the young man placed his hand upon the stranger’s chest. There was no sign of life. Indeed, he wondered that he had taken any trouble to ascertain what he already knew.
All this time the young man’s dread and terror, heightened by a sense of utter loneliness in the presence of the dead, had driven the woman from his mind. He had not yet seen the slightest trace of her. Did he have the strength to behold a woman mangled as he had found the man... Still, they should have decent interment; that was his duty as a man. And further, it was necessary that their identity be ascertained, in order that their friends might be informed.