Cig dropped back, whining. This was an adventure wholly out of his line. He was game enough in his way, but bucking blizzards was not one of the things he had known in his city-cramped experience.
“We gotta go back. It’ll get us sure if we don’t,” he pleaded.
Tug would have turned back gladly enough if he had known which way to go, but in the swirl of white that enveloped them he did not know east from west. The thing to do, he judged, was to strike as straight a line as possible. This ought to take them off the mesa to the shelter of some draw or wooded ravine.
“It’ll be better when we get where the wind can’t slam across the open at us,” he said.
For the moment at least the former convict was innocuous. He was wholly preoccupied with the battle against the storm. Tug took the lead and broke trail.
The whirling snow stung his face like burning sand. His skis clogged with the weight of the drifts. Each dragging step gave him the sense of lifting a leaden ball chained to his feet.
Cig went down, whimpering. “I’m all in!” he shrieked through the noise of the screaming blasts.
“Forget it, man!” Hollister dragged him to his feet. “If you quit now you’re done for. Keep coming. We’ll get off this mesa soon. It can’t be far now.”
He was none too confident himself. Stories came to his mind of men who had wandered round and round in a circle till the blizzard had taken toll of their vitality and claimed them for its own.
The prisoner sank down again and had to be dragged out of the drift into which he had fallen. Five or six times the taut rope stopped Tug’s progress. Somehow he cheered and bullied the worn-out man to the edge of the mesa, down a sharp slope, and into the wind-break of a young grove of pines.