CHAPTER XXIX—Tom Tramps Down McDonald Creek in a Chinook Wind, and Reaches Shelter Almost Exhausted
Meanwhile, Tom had been losing no time. An hour after he had yelled to Joe from the top of the danger zone on the wall, he had gone over the pass and reached the Granite Park chalet. Here he paused a few moments for breath, and looked across the shadow-filled cañon to the great white pinnacle of Heaven’s Peak, rosy-white with the sunrise. Then he plunged down the trail, with little fear of snowslides on this side because of the trees to anchor the drifts, and in another hour reached the Lake McDonald trail at the bottom. Without any pause, he plugged steadily along through the tall, silent, lonely forest, over such deep snow that he was elevated far above the underbrush and had difficulty sometimes in spotting the trail, and kept at it till noon. Then he paused to build a fire of dead pine limbs on trodden snow and cook himself some bacon, roasting it on a stick.
It was not till this lunch was eaten that he noticed the dusking of the sun, and looking up saw a great, ugly, dark cloud coming over the range to the west.
His heart, like Joe’s back in the cabin a little later, went down somewhere into his moccasins. But, he kept telling himself, he had only a dozen or fifteen more miles to go, he was in the protection of woods, and he couldn’t get lost because the cañon walls would always show him the way. Besides, he had his sleeping-bag. He could crawl into some hollow tree with it, if the blizzard got too bad. But he must not stop if he could help it.
“Mills’ life or mine!” he kept saying. “It’s up to me to save the Ranger!”
And he shouldered his pack once more, and pressed on, with one anxious eye on the trail, one on the cloud above, which was rapidly spreading across to the eastern range and enveloping the Divide. Every second he expected to see the first white, driving sheets of the blizzard, for the cloud was racing now, the wind up there was blowing hard. Yet no snow came. In fact, Tom began to get hot. He thought it was the exertion of trying to increase his pace. But when he stopped to rest his weary shoulders a moment, he was still hot. The wind was certainly beginning to come roaring down into the trees above him now. At last it hit his face. It was a hot wind!
Then, suddenly, he realized what was coming. “The Chinook!” he cried aloud.
It was the Chinook! In half an hour, Tom was in a wringing perspiration, and his fur coat had taken its place on his pack. Under his feet a miracle was being performed. The level of the snow was steadily sinking—slowly, to be sure, here in the woods, but steadily. It was sticky on his snow-shoes, but not half so sticky as he thought it would be. The wind seemed so dry that it just soaked the snow up, instead of melting it.
On and on Tom plodded, wearily, almost exhausted now, going on sheer nerve, till close to five o’clock he got a hint of the lake. Then he picked up other snow-shoe tracks, and Robinson Crusoe could not have been more delighted at the sight of a human footprint.
“There’s somebody at the hotel!” Tom cried, again aloud.