A Man: His Mark. A Romance / Second Edition

by W. C. Morrow

There was something else. Far back in the mountains, that wilder wilderness of the Trinity range, and in the Siskiyou range, beyond them, there were huge gray wolves, fierce and formidable. Now and then a daring hunter had come out of those mountains with the skin of a great gray wolf. There were old stories in the mountains that when the snow had been deep and of prolonged duration, the gray wolves came down to the tamer reaches inhabited by men, driven thither by hunger, for the game upon which they subsisted had fled before the snow to find herbage. The first to come out had been deer; soon after them had come the wolves. As the deer fell before the rifles of the settlers, the wolves had been driven to depredations on cattle and horses. There were ugly tales, too, of men attacked by them. Out of all this had grown the legend of a she-wolf that bore away children to her wolf-pack.

After the wind now raging in the mountains would come the snow, silent, deep, and implacable, to hide the work of the fallen tree below the hut; but would it hide everything so well that the great gray wolves, if driven by hunger from the remoter mountains, would fail to find what hunger required them to seek?

Wilder again attacked the tree with his axe,—another one lay dead there, and she must be found; and there was heavy and horrifying work ahead before the wind should cease and the snow begin to fall. At first the young man resumed his attack with the furious energy that had hitherto sustained his effort; but wisdom and caution came now to his aid. He realized his feebleness of mind, spirit, and body. He had devoted weeks of arduous work to the construction of his hut, and that had lent a certain strength to his muscles and buoyancy to his soul. Still, he was hardly more than a shadow of his old self, before his life had been wrecked a year ago, and he had come into the mountains to make a sturdy fight for self-mastery, for the regeneration of whatever shreds of manhood were left within him, and for their patching and binding into a fabric that should take its place in the ranks of men and work out a man’s destiny.

He went about his task with greater deliberation. He forced himself to regard with calmness the distorted dead face upturned toward him. He worked with that slowness which makes greater haste in achievement. This brought a surer judgment and an economy of effort and time. He cut the branches one by one and dragged them away.

Soon the woman’s form appeared. In the extreme moment of the catastrophe she had evidently sprung forward; this had brought her body, face downward, between the horses; they, in being crushed under the trunk of the tree, fallen across them, had nevertheless given her a certain protection; the trunk, in breaking the backs of the horses, had missed her head. As for the rest, she was so closely wedged between the horses that it would be difficult to extricate her.

This, however, was finally accomplished after great labor. The woman’s face and clothing were blood-stained. So much worse did she look than the man, that Wilder had a new struggle with himself to command courage and strength for the task. He dragged her out to a clear place in the road, and made the same perfunctory examination as in the case of the man. While he was doing so the woman moved and gasped, and this unexpected indication of life was the greatest shock of the tragedy.

But it was one of those shocks which bring new life and strength. Whereas, before he had been facing, without daring to contemplate, the awful duty that he owed the dead, here now was the most precious thing that the world then could have offered him,—here was Life, human life, fleeting, perhaps, but infinitely precious.

Wilder knelt beside the unconscious woman and with eager hands loosened her clothing. He ran to the river, dipped his handkerchief in the water, bathed her face, and removed some of the blood that covered it. He chafed her hands and wrists, anxiously watching for the slightest change. This came rapidly and progressed steadily. Removed from the crushing pressure of the horses, her chest found its natural expansion, and the rhythm of deep, slow breathing was established. Wilder had learned numerous elementary things from Dr. Malbone; he saw that, although the sufferer was so grievously hurt as to be unconscious, life was yet strong within her.

Time, then, was the precious element here. The sufferer must be taken at once to the hut, and Dr. Malbone summoned. As for the dead man, there was no present danger on his account, and the living demanded first attention.

A formidable task now confronted the young man. First, he had to bear the unconscious woman up the steep trail to the hut; then he should have to go many miles afoot to summon Dr. Malbone. The young man thought nothing of the difficulties, but all of the doing.