Thus the three hunters met him—in all his strength and glory—not fifty feet distant at the base of the hill. He seemed to be poised to charge.

Bill's keen eyes saw the bear first. All at once its huge outline against the snow leaped to his vision. At the same instant the bear growled, a sound that halted halted Virginia and Harold in their tracks. For an instant all four figures stood in indescribable tableau: the bear poised, the three staring, the snowy wastes silent and changeless and unreal.

It was the last sight in the world that Bill had expected. He had supposed that the grizzlies were all in hibernation now; he hadn't conceived of the possibilities whereby the great creature had been called from his sleep. And he knew in one glance the full peril of the situation.

Often in his forest travels Bill had met grizzlies, and nearly always he had passed them by. Usually the latter were glad to make their escape; and Bill would hasten their departure with shouts of glee. Yet this man knew the grizzly, his power and his wrath, and most of all he knew his utter unreliability. It is not the grizzly way to stand impassive when he is at bay, and neither does he like to flee up hill. If the animal did think his escape was cut off—a delusion to which the bear family seem particularly subject—he would charge them with a fury and might that had no equal in the North American animal world. And a grizzly charge is a difficult thing to stop in a distance of fifty feet.

The presence of Virginia in their party had its influence in Bill's decision. In times past he had been willing enough to take a small measure of risk to his own life, but the life of every grizzly in the North could not pay for one jot of risk to hers. Lastly he realized at the first sight of those glowing, angry eyes, the ears back, and the stiff hairs on the shoulder that the grizzly was in a fighting mood.

For all the complexity of his thought, his decision did not take an instant. There was no waiting to offer the sporting opportunity to Harold. Virginia was not aware of a lapse in time between the instant that Bill caught sight of the bear and that in which his gun came leaping to his shoulder. He had full confidence in the hard-hitting vicious bullet in Harold's thirty-five, and most of all he relied on the four reserve shots that he supposed lay in the rifle magazine. The grizzly dies hard: he felt that all four of them would be needed to arrest the charge that would likely follow his first shot.

He didn't wait for those great muscles to get into action. The animal was standing broadside to him, his head turned and red eyes watching; if Bill had his own gun, he would have aimed straight for the space between the eyes. This is never a sportsman's shot; but for an absolute marksman, in a moment of crisis, it is the surest shot of all. But he did not know Harold's gun well enough to trust such a shot. Indeed, he aimed for the great shoulder, the region of the lungs and heart. The gun cracked in the silence.

The bullet went straight home, ripping through the lungs, tearing the great arteries about the heart, shivering even a portion of the heart itself. And yet the grizzly sprang like a demon through the deep snow, straight towards him.

It is no easy thing to face a grizzly's charge. The teeth gleam in red foam, the eyes flash, the great shoulders rock. For all the deep snow that he bounded through, the beast approached at an unbelievable pace. He bawled as he came—awful, reverberating sounds that froze the blood in the veins. If the course had been open, likely he would have been upon him before Bill could send home another shot. There could only be one result to such a meeting as this. One blow would strike the life from Bill's body as the lightning strikes it from a tree. But the snow impeded the bear, and it seemed to Virginia's horrified eyes that Bill would have time to empty the magazine. She saw his fingers race as he worked the lever action of the gun: she saw his eyes lower again to the sights. The bear seemed almost upon him. And she screamed when she heard the impotent click of the hammer against the breech. Bill had fires the single shot that was in the gun.

Before ever he heard the sound Harold remembered. In one wave of horror he recalled that he had forgotten to refill the magazine with shells. Yet leaping fast—red and deadly and terrible upon the heels of his remorse—there came an emotion that seared him like a wall of fire. He saw Bill's fate. By no circumstance of which he could conceive could the man escape. A shudder passed over his frame, but it was not of revulsion. Rather it was an emotion known well to the beasts of prey, though to human beings it comes but rarely. Here was his enemy, the man he hated above all living creatures, and the blood lust surged through him like a madness. In one wave of ecstasy he felt that he was about to see the gratification of his hatred.

In the hands of a brave and loyal man, the rifle Harold carried might yet have been Bill's salvation. It was a large-caliber, close-range gun of stupendous striking power. Yet Harold didn't lift it to his shoulder. Part of it was willful omission, mostly it was the paralysis of terror. Yet he would have need enough for the gun if the bear turned on him. He saw that Bill's had was groping, hopeless though the effort was, for one of the shells that Harold had given him and which he carried in his pocket.

But there was no time to find it, to open his gun and insert it, and to fire before the ravening enemy would be upon him. He made the effort simply because it was his creed: to struggle as long as his life blood pulsed in his veins. He knew there was no chance to run or dodge. The bear could go at thrice his own pace in the deep snow. His last hope had been that Harold would come to his aid: that the man would stop the bear's charge with Bill's own heavy rifle; but now he knew that Harold's enmity of cowardice had betrayed him.

But at that instant aid came from an unexpected quarter. Virginia was not one to stand helpless or to turn and flee. She remembered the pistol at her belt, and she drew it in a flash of blue steel. True and straight she aimed toward the glowing eyes of the grizzly.

At the angle that they struck, her bullets did not penetrate the brain, but they did give Bill an instant's reprieve. The bear struck at the wounds they made, then halted, bawling, in the snow. His roving eye caught sight of Virginia's form. With a roar he bounded toward her.

The next instant was one of drama, of incredible stress and movement. For all his mortal wounds, the short distance between the bear and the girl seemed to recede with tragic swiftness. The animal's cries rang through the silent forest: near and far the wild creatures paused in their occupations to listen. Virginia also stood her ground. There was no use to flee; she merely stood straight, her eyes gazing along her pistol barrel, firing shot after shot into the animal's head. Because it was an automatic, she was able to send home the loads in rapid succession.

But they were little, futile things, with never the shocking power to stop that blasting charge. Her safety still lay in that in which she had always trusted, the same that had been her fort and her stronghold in all their past adventures. Bill saw the grizzly change in direction; his response was instinctive and instantaneous. He came leaping through the snow as if a great hand had hurled him, all of his muscles contracting in response to the swift, immutable command of his will. For all the burden of his snowshoes and the depths of the drifts, his leap was almost as fast as the grizzly's own. He had but one realization: that the girl's tender flesh must never know those rending claws and fangs. He leaped to intercept the rending charge with his own body.

But his hand had found the shell by now, dropped it into the gun, and as a last instinctive effort, pulled back the lever that slid the cartridge into the barrel. There was no time to raise the gun to his shoulder. He pointed it instinctively toward the gray throat. And the end of the barrel was against the bear's flesh as he pressed the trigger.

No human eye could follow the lightning events of the next fraction of a second. All that occurred was over and done in the duration of one heart-beat,—before the shudder and explosion in the air from the rifle's report had passed away. One instant, and the three figures seemed all together; Bill crouched with rifle held pointed in his arms, Virginia behind him, the grizzly full upon them both. The next, and Harold stood alone in the snow and the silence,—awed, terrified, and estranged as if in a dream.

Except for the three forms that lay still, half-buried and concealed in the drifts, it was as if the adventure never occurred. The spruce trees stood straight and aloof as ever. The silence stretched unbroken; its immensity had swallowed and smothered the last echo of the rifle report and the grizzly's roar. There was no movement, seemingly no life,—only the drifts and the winter forest and the futile sun, shining down between the snow-laden trees.

Yet he knew vaguely what had occurred. The bullet had gone true. It had pierced the animal's neck, breaking the vertebrae of the spinal column, and life had gone out of him as a flame goes out in the wind. But it had come too late to destroy the full force of the charge. Bill had been struck with some portion of the bear's body as he fell and had been hurled like a lifeless doll into the drifts. Virginia, too, had received some echo of that shock, probably from Bill's body as he shattered down. Now all three lay half-hidden in the snow. Which of them lived and which were dead Harold dared not guess.

But he had no time to go forward and investigate before Bill had sprung to his feet. He had received only a glancing blow; the drifts into which he had fallen were soft as pillows. In reality he had never even lost consciousness. Still subject to the one thought that guided and shaped his actions throughout the adventure, he crawled over to Virginia's side.

No living man had ever seen his face as white as it was now. His eyes were wide with the image of horror; he didn't know what wounds the dying bear might have inflicted on the girl. There was no rend in her white flesh, however; and his eye kindled and his face blazed when he saw that she yet lived.

He didn't waste even a small part of his energies by futile pleadings for her to waken. He seized her shoulders and shook her gently.

Instantly her eyes opened. Her full consciousness returned to her with a rush. She was not scratched, not even shocked by the fall, and she reached up for Bill's hands. And instantly, with a laugh on her lips, she sprang to her feet.

"You killed him?" she asked.

It was the first breath she had wasted, and no man might hold it against her. She had only to look at the huge gray form in the drifts to know her answer. Bill, because he was a woodsman first, last, and always, slipped additional shells into Harold's rifle; then walked over to the bear. He gazed down at its filming eyes.

"Bear's all dead," he answered cheerfully. And Virginia's heart raced and thrilled, and a delicious exaltation swept through her, when she glanced down at this woodsman's hands. Big and strong and brown, there was not a tremor in their fingers.

The both of them whirled in real and superlative astonishment. Some one was speaking to them. Some one was asking them if they were both all right. It was a strange voice,—one that they scarcely remembered ever hearing before.

But they saw at once that the speaker was Harold. He had come with them to-day, quite true. Both of them had almost forgotten his existence.



XIX

In the weeks they had been together, Bill had always been careful never to try to show Harold in a bad light. It was simply an expression of the inherent decency of the man: he knew that Virginia loved him, that she had plighted her troth to him, and as long as that love endured and the engagement stood, he would never try to shatter her ideals in regard to him. He knew it meant only heartbreak for her to love and wed a man she couldn't respect. He knew enough of human nature to realize that love often lives when respect is dead, and no possible good could come of showing up the unworthiness that he beheld in Harold. He had never tried to embarrass him or smirch his name. For all his indignation now, his voice was wholly cheerful and friendly when he answered.

"We're quite all right, thanks," he said. "The only casualty was the bear. A little snow on our clothes, but it will brush off. And by the way——"

He paused, and for all his even tones, Harold had a sickening and ghastly fear of the sober query in Bill's eyes. "Why did you give me an unloaded gun and tell me it was full?" he went on. "Except for a good deal of luck there'd been a smile on the face of the grizzly—but no Bill!"

He thought it only just that, in spite of Virginia's presence, Harold explain this grave omission. He felt that Virginia was entitled to an explanation too, and Harold knew, from her earnest eyes, that she was waiting his answer. He might have been arrogant and insulting to Bill, but he cared enough for Virginia's respect to wish to justify himself. He studied their faces; it was plain that they did not accuse him, even in their most secret thoughts, of evil intent in handing Bill an almost empty gun. But by the stern code of the North sins of carelessness are no less damning than intentional ones and Harold knew that he had a great deal to answer for.

"And by the way," Bill went on, as he waited for his reply, "I don't remember hearing my gun off during the fray. You might explain that, too."

"I didn't shoot because I couldn't," Harold replied earnestly. "At first you were between me and the bear—and then Virginia was. It all happened so quickly that there was nothing I could do. I can't imagine why I forgot to reload the rifle. A man can't always remember—everything. I thought I had. Thank God that it didn't turn out any worse than it did."

Bill nodded; the girl's face showed unspeakable relief. She was glad that this lover of hers had logical and acceptable reasons for his omissions. The incident was past, the issue dead. They gathered about the gray grizzled form in the snow.

"Does this—help our food problem any?" Virginia asked.

"Except in an emergency—no. Virginia, you ought to try to cut that foreleg muscle." He lifted one of the front feet of the bear in his hands. "You'd see what it would be like to try to bite it. He's an old, tough brute—worse eating than a wolf. Strong as mink and hard as rock. If we were starving, we'd cut off one of those hams in a minute; but we can wait a while at least. If we don't pick up some more game during the day, I'll hike over to my Twenty-three Mile cabin and get the supplies I've left over there. There's a smoked caribou ham, among other things. I'll bring back a backload, anyway." Then his voice changed, and he looked earnestly into Virginia's eyes. "But you won't want to hunt any more to-day. I forgot—what a shock this experience would be to you."

She smiled, and the paleness about her lips was almost gone. "I'm getting used to shocks. I feel a little shaky—but it doesn't amount to anything. I want to climb up and look at the caribou trail, at least."

"Sure enough—if you feel you can stand it. It's only a hundred yards or so up the hill. I'd like to take old Bruin's hide, but I don't see how we could handle it. I believe we'd better leave him with all his clothes on, in the snow. And Heaven knows I'd like to find out what the old boy was doing out—at a time when all the other bears are hibernating."

They continued on up the creek until the grade of the hill was less, then clambered slowly up. Fifty yards up the slope they encountered the old caribou trail, but none of these wilderness creatures had been along in recent days. They followed it a short distance, however, back in the direction they had come and above the scene of their battle with the bear.

"No profit here," Bill said at last. "We might as well go down to the creek bed and find better walking."

They turned, and in an instant more came back to their own tracks. And suddenly Bill stopped and stared at them in dumb amazement.

He looked so astonished, so inexpressibly baffled, that for a moment his two companions were stricken silent. Virginia's heart leaped in her throat. Yet the tracks contained no message for her.

"What's the matter?" Harold asked. "What do you see?"

Bill caught himself and looked up. "Nothing very important—but mighty astonishing at that. We've just walked in a two-hundred-yard circle, up the creek to where we climbed the hill, back along the hill in this direction, and then down. And we haven't crossed that grizzly's tracks anywhere."

"Well, what of it?"

"Man, this snow has been here for weeks, with very little change. Do you mean to tell me that a lively, hungry bear is going to stay that long in one place unless he's asleep? Virginia, as sure as you live we—or somethin'—wakened that bear out of hibernation. And his den is somewhere in that two-hundred-yard circle."

"There's probably a cave in the rock," Harold suggested. "And I'm more interested in the cabin and dinner than I am in it."

"Nevertheless, I've never looked into a den of hibernation, and I've always wanted to know what they're like. It will only take a minute. Come on—it will be worth seeing."

But Harold had very special and particular reasons why such a course appealed to him not at all. "Yes—and maybe find a couple of other bears in there, in the dark and no chance to fight. I'm not interested, anyway. Go and look, if you like."

"I will, if you don't mind. Do you want to come too, Virginia? There's no danger—really there isn't. If this had been an old she-bear we might have found some cubs, but these old males travel around by themselves."

"I certainly wouldn't stay away," the girl replied. And her interest was real: the study of the forest life about her had been an ever increasing delight. She felt that she would greatly like to peer into one of those dark, mysterious dens where that most mysterious American animal, the grizzly, lies in deep coma through the long, winter months.

"It will only take a minute. We haven't got to back-track him more than a hundred yards at most. We'll be back in a minute, Harold. And if you don't mind—I'll take my own gun."

They exchanged rifles, and Virginia and Bill started back toward the fallen grizzly. But the exploration of the winter lair had not been the only thing Bill had in view. He also had certain words to say to Virginia,—words that he could scarcely longer repress, and which he couldn't have spoken with ease in Harold's presence. But now that they were alone, the sentences wouldn't shape on his lips.

He mushed a while in silence. "I suppose I haven't got to tell you, Virginia," he said at last. "That you—your own courage—saved my life."

She looked up to him with lustrous eyes. The man thrilled to the last little nerve. In her comradeship for him their luster was almost like that of which he had dreamed so often. "I know it's true," she answered frankly. "And I'm glad that—that it was mine, and not somebody else's." She too seemed to be having difficulty in shaping her thoughts. "I've never been happier about any other thing. To pay—just a little bit of debt. But in paying it, I incurred another—so the obligation is just as big as ever. You know—you saved my life, too."

He nodded. This was no time for deception, for pretty lies.

"I saw you throw yourself in front of me," she went on. "I can never forget it. I'll see that picture, over and over again, till I die—how you plunged through the snow and got in front. So since we each did for the other—the only thing we could do—there's nothing more to be said about it. Isn't that so, Bill?"

The man agreed, but his lips trembled as they never did during the charge of the grizzly.

"I've learned a lesson up here—that words aren't much good and don't seem to get anywhere." The girl spoke softly. "Only deeds count. After they're done, there is nothing much—that one can say."

So they did not speak of the matter again. They came to the bear's body and back-tracked him through the snow. They pushed through the young spruce from whose limbs the grizzly had knocked the snow. They they came out upon the cavern mouth.

Instantly Bill understood how the fall of the tree had knocked away the snow from the maw. "There's been a landslide here too, or a snowslide," he said. "You see—only the top of the cave mouth is left open. The dirt's piled around the bottom."

He crawled up over the pile of rocks and dirt and, stooping, stepped within the cavern. The girl was immediately behind him. Back five feet from the opening the interior was dark as night: the cavern walls, gray at the mouth, slowly paled and faded and were obliterated in the gloom. But there was no stir of life in the darkness, no sign of any other habitant. But the walls themselves, where the light from without revealed them, held Bill's fascinated gaze.

The girl stood behind him, silent, wondering what was in his mind. "This cave—I've never seen a cave just like this. Virginia——"

The man stepped forward and scratched a match on the stone. It flared; the shadows raced away. Then Bill's breath caught in a half-sob.

Instantly he smothered the match. The darkness dropped around them like a curtain. But in that instant of light Bill beheld a scene that tore at his heart. Against the cavern wall, lost in the irremediable darkness, he had seen a strange, white shape—a ghostly thing that lay still and caught the match's gleam—a grim relic of dead years.

He turned to the girl, and his voice was almost steady when he spoke. "You'd better go out, Virginia—into the light," he advised.

"Why? Is it—danger?"

"Not danger." His voice in the silence thrilled her and moved her. "Only wickedness. But it isn't anything you'd like to see."

The single match-flare had revealed him the truth. For one little fraction of an instant he had thought that the white form, so grim and silent against the stone, revealed some forest tragedy of years ago,—a human prey dragged to a wild beast's lair. But the shape of the cavern, the character of its walls, and a thousand other clews told the story plainly. The thing he had seen was a naked skeleton, flesh and garments having dropped away in the years; and the grizzly had simply made his lair in the old shaft of his father's mine. Bill had found his father's sepulcher at last!

* * * * *

For a moment he stood dreaming in the gloom. He understood, now, why his previous search had never revealed the mine. He had supposed that his father had operated along some stream, washing the gold from its gravel: it had never occurred to him that he had dug a shaft. In all probability, considering the richness of their content, they had burrowed into the hill and had found an old bed of the stream, had carried the gravel to the water's edge in buckets, and washed it out. He had never looked for tunnels and shafts: if he had done so, it was doubtful if he could have found the hidden cavern. The snowslide of some years before had covered up all outward signs of their work, struck down the trees they had blazed, and covered the ashes of their own camp fires. The girl's voice in the darkness called him from his musings.

"I believe I understand," she said. "You've found your mine—and your father's body."

"Yes. Just a skeleton."

"I'm not afraid. Do you want me to stay?"

"I'd love to have you, if you will. Some way—it takes away a lot of my bitterness—to have you here."

It was true. It seemed wholly fitting that she should be with him as he explored the cavern. It was almost as if the tragedy of his father's death concerned her, too.

"I can hold matches," she told him. She came up close, and for a moment her hand, groping, closed on his,—a soft, dear pressure that spoke more than any words. When it was released he lighted another match.

They stood together, looking down at the skeleton. But she wasn't quite prepared for what she saw. A little cry of horror rang strangely in the dark shaft.

This had been no natural death. Undoubtedly the elder Bronson had been struck down from behind, as he worked, and he lay just as he fell. There was one wound in the skull, round and ghastly, and in a moment they saw the weapon that made it. A rusted pick, such as miners use, lay beside the body.

"I won't try to do much to-day," the man told her, "except to see up one of my cornerposts and erect a claim notice. My father's notice has of course rotted away in the years and the monument that probably stood out there beyond the creek bed was covered in snowslide. You see, a claim is made by putting up four stone monuments—one at each corner of the area claimed. We'll be starting down in a day or two, and I'll register the claim. Then I'll come back—and give these poor bones decent burial."

From there he walked back to the end of the shaft, scratching another match. It was wholly evident that the mine was only scratched. He held the light close, studying the rear wall of the cave. It was simply a gravel bed, verifying his guess that here lay an old bed of the creek. In the first handful of stone he scraped out he found a half-ounce nugget.

"It's rich?" she asked.

"Beyond what I ever dreamed. But there's nothing more we can do now. I've made my find at least—but it doesn't seem to make me—as happy as it ought to. Of course that man—there against the wall—would naturally keep a man from being very happy. Of, if I could only find and kill the devil who did it!"

His voice in the gloom was charged with immeasurable feeling. She had never seen this side of him before. Here was primeval emotion, the desired for vengeance, filial obligation, hate that knew no mercy and could never be forgotten. She understood, now, the savage feuds that sometimes spring up among the mountain people, unable to forget a blow or an injury. She had the first inkling of how deeply his father's murder had influenced him.

But his face was calm when they emerged into the light. They walked over to the creek, and beneath its overhanging banks there were the snow had not swept, he found enough rocks for his monument. He gathered them, carried them in armfuls to a place fifty yards beyond the creek and down it, level with such a turn in the hillside above, beyond which the old creek bed obviously could not lie; then heaped them into a moment. Then he drew an old letter from his coat pocket, and searching farther, found a stub of a pencil. Virginia looked over his shoulders as he wrote.

One hundred yards up the stream Harold watched them, dumbfounded as to what they were doing. He saw Bill finish the writing, then place the larger on the monument, fastening it down with a large stone. Then he came mushing toward them.

So intent were they upon their work that they didn't notice him until he was almost up to them. But both of them would have paused in wonder if they had observed the curious mixture of emotions upon his lips. His lips hung loose, his eyes protruded, and something that might have been greed, or might have been jealousy or some other unguessed emotion drew and harshened his features.

"You've found a mine?" he asked.

Virginia looked up, joyful at Bill's good fortune. "We've found his father's mine—the old shaft where the bear was been sleeping. But there's a dreadful side of it too."

"Show me where it is. I want to see it. Take me into it, Virginia—right away——"

Bill had a distinct sensation of revulsion at the thought of this man going into his father's sepulcher, and he didn't know why. It was an instinct too deeply buried for him to trace. But he tried to force it down. There was no reason why Virginia's fiance shouldn't view his mine. Already, Virginia was pointing out the way.

"You can claim half to it," he was whispering into her ear. "You were the one with him when he found it."

"I can—but I won't," she replied coldly. "He asked me to go with him. The thought's unworthy of you, Harold."

But he was in no mood to be humbled by her disapproval. Curiously, he was intensely excited. He mushed away toward the cavern mouth.

Two minutes later he stood in the darkness of the funnel, fumbling for a match. "Gold, gold, gold," he whispered. "Heaps and heaps of it—what I've always hunted. And Bill had to find it. That devil had to walk right into it."

He was sickened by the thought that except for his own cowardice he would have accompanied them into the den. At least he should have done that much, he told himself, to atone for his conduct during the bear's charge. Then he would have been in a position to claim half the mine—and get it too. Dark thoughts, curiously engrossing and lustful, thronged his mind.

He found a match at least and it flared in the darkness. And the white skeleton lay just at his feet.

He drew back, startled, but instantly recognized his poise. He knelt with unexplicable intentness. He too saw the ghastly wound and its grim connection with the rusted pick. And he bent, slowly, like a man who is trying to control an unwonted eagerness, lifted the pick in his arms.

His fingers seemed to curl around it, like those of a miser around his gold. Some way, his grasp seemed caressing. Oh, it was easy to handle and lift! How naturally it swung in his arms! What a deadly blow the cruel point could inflict! Just one little tap had been needed. Bronson had rocked and fallen, no longer to hold his share in the mine's gold. If there were an enemy before him now, one tap, and one alone was all that would be needed.

He could picture the scene of some twenty years before; the flickering candles, the gray walls covered with dancing shadows, the yellow gold,—beautiful in the light. He could see Bronson working,—always the plodder, always the fool! Behind him Rutheford, his partner, the pick in his arms and his brave intent in his brain. Then one swift stroke——

Harold did not know that at the thought his muscles made involuntary response. He swung the pick down, imagining the blow, with a ferocity and viciousness that would have been terrible to see.

In the darkness his face was drawn and savage, and ugly fires glowed and smoldered and flamed in his eyes.



XX

Bill made plans for an early start to his Twenty-three Mile cabin. The hike would have been easy enough, considering the firm snow that covered the underbrush, but the hours of daylight were few and swift. And he had no desire to try to find his way in that trackless country in the darkness.

"I'll leave before dawn—as soon as it gets gray," he told Virginia as he bade her good night. "I'll come back the next day, with a backload of supplies. And with the little we have left, we will have enough to go on. We can start for Bradleyburg the day after that."

Virginia took no pleasure in bidding him good-by. She had already learned that this winter forest was a bleak and fearful place when her woodsman was away. Curiously, she could find little consolation in the thought that she and Harold could have a full day together, alone. And before the night was half over, it seemed to her, she heard his stealing feet on the cabin floor outside her curtain.

He seemed to be moving quietly, almost stealthily. She heard the stove door open, and the subdued crack of a match scratched gently. A warm glow flooded her being when she understood.

For all the arduous day's toil that waited him, Bill hadn't forgotten to build her fire. The cabin would still be warm for her to dress. She didn't know that her eyes were shining in the gloom. She drew aside the curtain.

"I'm awake, Bill. I want to tell you good-by again," she said.

"I don't see what makes me so clumsy," Bill returned impatiently. "I thought I could get this fire going without waking you up. But I'm glad enough to have another good-by."

"And you'll be—awfully careful?" Her voice did not hold quite steadily. "So many—many things can happen in those awful woods—when you are alone. I never realized before how they're always waiting, always holding a sword over your head, ready to cut you down. I'm afraid to have you go——"

He laughed gently, but the deathless delight he felt at her words rippled through the laugh like flowing water. "There's nothing to be afraid of, Virginia. You'll see me back to-morrow night. I've wandered these woods by myself a thousand times——"

"And the thousandth and first time you might fall into their trap! But why can't we take some of that grizzly meat——"

"Virginia, you'd break your pretty teeth on it. Of course we could in a pinch—but this is no march, to-day. Good-by."

"Good-by." Her voice sank almost to a whisper, and her tones were sober and earnest. "I'll pray for you, Bill—the kind of prayers you told me about—entreating prayer to a God that can hear—and understand—and help. A real God, not just an Idea such as I used to believe in. Here's my hand, Bill."

He groped for it as a plant gropes for sunlight, as the blind grope to find their way. He found it at last: it was swallowed in his own palm, and the heart of the man raced and thrilled and burned. She couldn't see what he did with it in the darkness. It seemed to her she felt a warmth, a throbbing, a pressure that was someway significant and portentous above any experience of her life. Yet she didn't know that he had dropped to his knees outside the curtain and pressed the hand to his lips. The door closed slowly behind him.

The last stars were fading, slipping away like ghosts into the further recesses of the sky, as he pushed away from the cabin door. He didn't need the full light of morning to find his way the first few miles. He need only head toward the peak of a familiar mountain, now a shadow against the paling sky.

The night was not so cold as it had a right to be. He had expected a temperature far below zero: in reality it seemed not far below freezing. Some weather change impended, and at first he felt vaguely uneasy. But he mushed on, the long miles gliding slowly, steadily beneath him. Only once he missed his course, but by back-tracking one hundred yards he found it again.

Morning came out, the trees emerged from the gloom, the shadows faded. He kept his direction by the landmarks learned while following his trap lines. The day was surprisingly warm. His heavy woolens began to oppress him.

As always the wilderness was silent and vaguely sinister, but after a few hours it suddenly occurred to him that the air was preternaturally still. A few minutes later, when he struck a match to light his pipe, this impression was vividly confirmed. As is the habit with all woodsmen he watched the match-smoke to detect the direction of the wind. The blue strands, with hardly a waver or tremor, streamed straight up. He was somewhat reassured, however, when he remembered that he had not yet emerged from a great valley between low ranges that ordinarily prevented free passage of the winds.

He mushed on, his snowshoes crunching on the white crust. The powers of the wilderness gave him good speed—almost to the noon hour. Then they began to show him what they could do.

He was suddenly aware that the fine edge of the wilderness silence had been dulled. There was a faint stir at his ear drums, to dim to name or identify or even to accept as a reality. He stopped, listening intently.

The stir grew to a faint and distant murmur, the murmur to a long swish like a million rustling garments. A tree fell, with a crash, far away. Then the wind smote him.

In itself it was nothing to fear. It was not a hurricane, not even a particularly violent storm, but only a brisk gale that struck him from the side and more or less impeded his progress. Trees that were tottering and ready to fall went down with reverberating reports; the snowdust whirled through the forest, changing the contour of the drifts, and filling up the tracks of the wild creatures. But for Bill the wind held a real menace. It was from the southeast, and warm as a girl's hand against his face.

No man of the Northwest Provinces is unacquainted with this wind. It is prayed for in the spring because its breath melts the drifts swiftly, but it is hated to death by the traveler caught far from his cabin on snowshoes. The wind was the far-famed Chinook, the southeast gale that softens the snow as a child's breath melts the frost on a window pane.

It did not occur to Bill to turn back. Already he was nearly halfway to his destination. The food supplies had to be secured, sooner or later; and when the Chinook comes no man knows when it will go away. He mushed on through the softening snow.

Within an hour the crust was noticeably softer. One hour thereafter and the snow was soft and yielding as when it had first fallen in early winter. Mushing was no longer a pleasant pursuit. Henceforth it was simply toil, rigorous and exhausting. The snowshoe sank deep, the snow itself clung to the webs and frame until it was almost impossible to lift.

A musher in the soft wet snow can only go at a certain pace. There is no way to hurry the operation and get speedily over the difficulties. Any attempt to quicken the pace results only in a fall. The shoe cannot be pushed ahead as when the snow is well-packed or crusted. It has to be deliberately lifted, putting the leg tendons to an unnatural strain.

It was too far to turn back. As many miles of weary snow stretched behind him as before him. At Twenty-three Mile cabin he could pass a night as comfortable as at home: there were food and blankets in plenty, and the well-built hut contained a stove. Once there, he could wait for a hard freeze that would be certain to harden the half-thawed snow and make it fit for travel. His only course was to push on step by step.

The truth suddenly dawned upon him that he was face to face with one of the most uncomfortable situations of all his years in the forest. He didn't believe he would be able to make the cabin before the fall of night; if indeed he were able to complete the weary miles, it would only be by dint of the most cruel and exhausting labor. He carried no blankets, and although with the aid of his camp ax he could keep some sort of a fire, a night out in the snow and the cold was not an experience to think of lightly.

Bill knew very well just what capabilities for effort the human body holds. It has certain definite limits. After a few hours of such labor as this the body is tired,—tired clear through and aching in its muscles. Despondency takes the place of hope, the step is somewhat faltering, hunger assails and is forgotten, even the solace of tobacco is denied because the hand is too tired to grope for and fill the pipe. Thereafter comes a deeper stage of fatigue, one in which every separate step requires a distinct and tragic effort of will. The perceptions are blunted, the uncertainty of footfall is more pronounced, the stark reality of the winter woods partakes of a dreamlike quality. Then comes utter and complete exhaustion.

In its first stages there can still be a few dragging or staggering steps, a last effort of a brave and commanding will. Perhaps there is even a distance of creeping. But then the march is done! There is no comeback, no rallying. The absolute limit has been reached. But fortunately, lying still in the snow, the wanderer no longer cares. He wonders why he did not yield to this tranquil comfort long since.

Bill began to realize that he was approaching his own limit. The weary miles crept by, but with a tragic languor that was like a nightmare. But time flew; only a little space of daylight remained.

Bill's leg muscles were aching and burning now, and he had to force himself on by sheer power of his will. He would count twenty-five painful steps, then halt. The wind had taken a more westerly course by now, and the snow was no longer melting. The air was more crisp: probably one night would serve to recrust the snow. But the fact became ever more evident that the darkness would overtake him before he could reach the cabin.

But now, curiously, he dreaded the thought of pausing and making a fire. Partly he feared—with the age-old fear that lay buried deep in every cell—the long, bitter night without shelter, food or blankets; but even the labor of fire-building appalled his spirit. I would be a mighty task, fatigued as he was: first to clear away the snow, cut down trees, hew them into lengths and split them—all with a light camp ax that only dealt a sparrow blow—then to kneel and stoop and nurse the fire.

His woodsman's senses predicted a bitter night, in spite of the warmth of the day. It would harden the snow again, but it would also wage war against his life. All night long he would have to fight off sleep so that he could mend the fire and cut fuel. It mustn't be a feeble, flickering fire. The cold could get in then. All night long the flame must not be allowed to flag. In his fatigue it would be so easy to dose off,—just for a moment, and the fire would burn out. In that case the fire of his spirit would burn out too,—just as certain, just as soon.

Late afternoon: already the shadows lay strange and heavy in the distant tree aisles. And all at once he paused, thrilled, in his tracks.

A little way to the east, on the bank of a small creek, his father and his traitorous partner had once had a mining claim,—a mine they had tried unsuccessfully to operate before Bronson had made his big strike. They had built a small cabin, and for nearly thirty years it had stood moldering and forgotten. Twice in his life Bill had seen it,—once as a boy, when his father had taken him there on some joyous, holiday excursion, and once in his travels Bill had beheld it at a distance. Its stove had rotted away years since; it contained neither food nor blankets nor furniture, yet it was a shelter against the night and the cold. And even now it was within half a mile of where he stood.

Exultant and thankful, Bill turned in his tracks and mushed over toward it.



XXI

There was plenty of heart-breaking work to do when Bill finally reached the little cabin. The snow had banked up to the depth of several feet around it and had blown and packed against the door. He took off one of his snowshoes to use as a shovel and stolidly began the work of removing the barricade. There was no opening the door against the pressure of the snow. Besides, the bolt was solidly rusted.

But after a few weary strokes it occurred to him that the easiest way would be to cut some sort of an opening in the top of the door, just large enough for his body to crawl through. As the cabin was abandoned there would be no possible disadvantage to such an opening: and since the fire had to be built outside the cabin, against the backlogs, the door would have to be left open anyway, to admit the heat. With a few strokes of his sharp little camp ax he cut away the planks, leaving a black hole in the door. He lighted a match and peered in.

The interior was unchanged since his previous visit, years before. The cabin had no floor, not the least vestige of furniture, and rodents had littered the ground with leaves.

He turned to his toil of making a fire. First he cut down a spruce—a heart-breaking task with his little ax—then laboriously hacked it into lengths. These he bore to the cabin, staggering with the load. He split the logs, cutting some of them into firewood for kindling. Then he made a pile of shavings.

He tested the wind and found it blowing straight west and away from the cabin. He felt oddly tired and dull, much too tired to strain and listen for some whispered message of an inner voice that seemed to be trying hard to get his attention, a few little, vague misgivings that haunted him. His comfort depended, he told himself, on the heat of the fire beating in through the little opening of the cabin door, so he placed the backlog just as close as he dared in front. Then he laid down split pieces for frame of his fire and erected his heap of kindling.

He entered through the opening and stood on the ground below to light the fire. He didn't desire to crawl through the flames to enter the cabin. Reaching as far as he could, he was just able to insert the candle. The wind caught it, the kindling flames. Then he stood shivering, waiting for the room to warm.

He had a sweeping flood of thoughts as he watched the leaping flame. Its cheerful crackle, its bright color in the gloom was almost too good to be true. In these dark forests he had learned to be wary and on guard at too great fortune. Quite often it was only a prank of perverse forest gods, before they smote him with some black disaster. It seemed to him that there was a wild laughter, a Satanic mocking in the joyous crackle that was vaguely but fearfully ominous. The promise in the rainbow, the siren's song to the mariners, the little dancing light in the marsh—promising warmth and safety but only luring the weary traveler to this death—had this same quality: the cheer, the hope, the beauty only to be blasted by misfortune.

The warmth flooded in, and he looked about for something to sit on. He wished he had brought in one of the spruce logs he had cut. But it was too late to procure one now. The flames leaped at the opening of the cabin: he would be obliged to crawl laboriously through them to get into the open. Tired out, he lay down in the dry dirt, putting his arm under his head. He would soon go to sleep.

But his ragged, exhausted nerves would not find rest in sleep at once. His thoughts were troubling and unpleasant. The pale firelight filled the cabin, dancing against the walls. The glare reflected wanly on the ground where he lay.

All at once he was aware that his eyes were fastened upon an old cigar box on a shelf against the wall. He seemed to have a remembered interest in it,—as if long ago he had examined its contents with boyish speculations. But he couldn't remember what it contained. Likely enough it was empty.

The hours were long, and the wind wailed and crept like a housebreaker about the cabin; and at last—rather more to pass the time than for any other reason—he climbed to his feet and stepped to the shelf on which the box lay.

As he reached to seize it, he had a distinct premonition of misfortune. It was as if some subtle consciousness within him, knowing and remembering every detail of his past and its infinite and exact relations with his present, was warning him that to open the box was to receive knowledge that would be hateful to him. Yet he would not be cowed by such a visionary danger. He was tired out, his nerves were torn, and he was prey to his own dark imaginings. Likely enough the box was empty.

It was not, however. It contained a single photograph.

His eye leaped over it. He remembered now; he had looked at it during his former visit to the cabin, years before. It was a typical old-fashioned photograph—two men standing in stiff and awkward poses in an old-fashioned picture gallery—printed in the time-worn way. No modern photographer, however, could have caught a better likeness or made a more distinct picture. It had obviously been one of his father's possessions and had been left in the cabin.

One of the men was his own father. He had seen his photograph often enough to recognize it; besides, he remembered the man in the flesh. And he stared at the other face—a rather handsome, thin-lipped, sardonic-eyed face—as if he were looking at a ghost.

"Great God," he cried. "It's Harold Lounsbury!"

But instantly he knew it could not be Harold Lounsbury. The picture was fully twenty-five years old and the face was that of a mature man, probably aged thirty. Harold Lounsbury himself was only thirty. And now, looking closer, he saw that the features were not quite the same. There was more breeding, more sensitiveness in Harold's face. And there was also, dim and haunting, some slight resemblance to Kenly Lounsbury, whom he had brought up into Clearwater and who had gone back with Vosper.

Yet already his inner consciousness was screaming in his ear the identity of this man. Already he knew. It was no other than Rutheford, the man who later, in the cavern darkness, had struck his father down.

His deductions followed with deadly and remorseless certainty. He knew now why Harold Lounsbury had come into Clearwater. Virginia had told Bill that her lover seemed to have some definite place in view for his prospecting: he had simply come to search for the same lost mine that Bill had discovered the previous day. He knew now why Kenly Lounsbury had been willing to finance Virginia's trip into the North,—not in hopes of finding his lost nephew, but to find the mine of which he also had some knowledge and thus repair the broken remnants of his fortune. In the same sweep of realization he knew why Harold Lounsbury's face had always haunted him and filled him with hazy, uncertain memories. He had never seen Harold before; but he had seen this photograph in his own boyhood, and Harold's face had so resembled the one in the picture that it had haunted and disturbed him.

Only too well he knew the truth. Harold Lounsbury was Rutheford's son,—the son of his father's murderer. Kenly Lounsbury was Rutheford's brother. Both had come to Clearwater to repair their broken fortunes from the mine of which they both had knowledge. Whether it was guilty knowledge or not no man could tell.

Such directions as Rutheford had given his son had been unavailing because of the snowslide that had changed the contour of the little valley where the mine lay. He understood now Harold's disappointment and emotion when Bill had discovered the mine. Likely his own name was Harold Rutheford, or else Rutheford's true name had been Lounsbury. Bill stood shivering all over with rage and hate.

Now he knew the road of vengeance! He had only to trace Harold Lounsbury back to his city—there to find his father's murderer. His eyes were glittering and terrible to see at the potentialities of that finding. Yet in an instant he knew that death had likely already claimed the elder Rutheford. Otherwise he himself would have come back, long since, to recover the mine. He would be financing the expedition, rather than his brother Kenly.

But by that stern old law, the law that goes down to the roots of the earth and whose justice lies in mystic balances beyond the sight of men, has it not been written that the sins of the father shall be visited upon the son? It wasn't too late yet to command some measure of payment. In Virginia's own city lived the Lounsburys,—a proud and wealthy family, moving in the most haughty circles, patronizing the humble, flattered and honored and exalted. But oh, he could break them down! He could stamp their name with shame. He could not pay eye for eye and tooth for tooth, because Rutheford was likely already dead. He could not pay for his father's murder by striking down his murderer. But he could make Harold pay for his own wrongs. He could make him atone for the bitter moments of his youth and manhood, that irremediable loss of his boyhood. If Rutheford had left a widow he could make her pay for his own mother's sufferings.

As he stood in that bleak and lonely cabin, lost in the desolate wastes of snow, he was simply the clansman—the feudist—the primitive avenger. Virginia too should know the crime, and the haunting sight of those pitiful bones in the dark cavern would rise before her eyes whenever she sought Harold's arms. He would show her the picture; she could see the murderer's face in her own lover's. She could never yield to him then——

Virginia! Soft above the wail and complaint of the wind, he spoke her name. His star, his universe, the gracious, beautiful girl whose happiness had been his one aim! And could he change that aim now?

The wind wept, the snow was swept before it in great, unearthly clouds of white, the fire crackled and leaped at the opening in the cabin door. The northern winter night closed down, ever deeper, ever darker, ever more fraught with those mighty passions of the human soul. But he responded no more to the wild music of the wind. The wilderness passions no longer found an echo in his own heart. He had suddenly remembered Virginia.

His face was like clay in the dancing light. His eyes were sunken and were dark as night. He knew now where his course would lie. All at once he knew by a knowledge true as life that this dark cabin, in the dark forest, must keep its secrets.

He could not wreak vengeance upon the man Virginia loved. He could not take payment from her. The same law that had governed him before was still the immutable voice of his being, the basic and irrevocable law of his life. He could not blast her happiness with such a revelation as this. His boyhood dream of vengeance would go the way of all his other dreams,—like the smoke of a camp fire lost in the unmeasured spaces of the forest. The shadow that the dark woods had cast upon his spirit seemed to grow and deepen.

But he must act now, while his strength was upon him. To look again into Harold's face might cost him his own resolve. To think of Virginia in his arms, her lips against his, the wicked blood of the man pulsing so close that she could thrill at it and hear it, might set him on fire again. He must destroy the evidence. The night might bring his own death—he had a vague presentiment of disaster—and this photograph must never be found beside his body. She knew his father's story; her quick mind would leap to the truth at once. Besides, the destruction of the photograph—so that he could never look at it again—might lessen his own bitterness and give him a little peace. He crumpled it in his hand, and turning, gave it to the flames at the cabin mouth.

And from the savage powers of Nature there came a strange and incredible response. The wind shrieked, then seemed to ship about in the sky, completely changing direction. And all at once the smoke from the fire began to pour in upon him, choking his lungs and filling his eyes with tears.



XXII

For a full moment Bill gave little attention to the deepening clouds of pungent, biting wood smoke that the wind whipped in through the hole he had cut in the door. Likely it was just a momentary gust, a shifting in the air currents, and the wind would soon resume its normal direction. Besides, the discovery that he had just made seemed to hold and occupy all the territory of his thought: he was scarcely aware of the burning pain that the acrid, resinous green-wood smoke brought to his eyes. This was the most bitter moment of his life, and he was lost and remote in his dark broodings. The smoke didn't matter.

He began really to wonder about it when the room grew so smoky that it no longer received the firelight. The hole in the door was like a flue: the smoke—that deadly green-wood smoke known of old to the woodsman—streamed through in great clouds. He had shut his eyes at first; now he found it impossible to keep them open. The pungent smoke crept into his lungs and throat, burning like fire. He knew that it could no longer be disregarded.

It had been part of his wilderness training to respond like lightning in a crisis. Many times on the forest trails life itself had depended upon an instantaneous decision, then immediate effort to carry the decision out. The fawn that does not leap like a serpent's head at the first crack of a twig as the wolf steals toward him in the thicket never lives to grow antlers. The power to act, to summon and focus the full might of the muscles in the wink of an eye, then to hurl them into a breach had been Bill's salvation many times. But to-night the power seemed gone. For long seconds his muscles hung inert. He didn't know what to do.

The capacity for mighty and instantaneous effort seemed gone from his body. His mind was slow too,—blunted. He could make no decisions. He only seemed bewildered and impotent.

The truth was that Bill had been near the point of utter exhaustion from his day's toil in the snow and his labor of building the fire. The vital nervous fluids no longer sprang forth to his muscles at the command of his brain: they came tardily, if at all. The fountain of his nervous energy had simply run down as the battery runs down in a motor, and it could only be recharged by a rest. But there was a deeper reason behind this strange apathy. The last blow—the sight of the photograph of his father's murderer and its new connection with his life—had for the time being at least crushed the fighting spirit within the man. The fight for life no longer seemed worth while. In his bitterness he had lost the power to care.

The smoke deepened in the cabin. It seemed to be affecting his power to stand erect. He tried to think of some way to save himself; his mind was slow and dull.

He knew that he couldn't get out of the cabin. There was only a little hole in the door; to crawl through it, inch by inch as he had entered, would subject him to the full fury of the flames. Oh, they would sear and destroy him quickly if he tried to creep through them! All night they had been mocking him with their cheerful crackle; they had only been waiting for this chance to torture him. He had to spring high to enter the little hole at all; there was no way to dodge the flames outside. But he might knock the logs apart and put the fire out.

There was only a distance of two paces between him and the door, but he seemed to have difficulty in making these. He reeled against the wall. But when he tried to thrust his arms through to reach the burning logs, the cruel tongues stabbed at his hands.

But in spite of the pain, he reached again. The skin blistered on his hands, and for a long, horrible instant he groped impotently. The flame was raging by now, two or three pitch-laden spruce chunks blazing fiercely at once, and it seemed wholly likely that the cabin itself would catch fire. But he couldn't reach the logs.

He remembered his gloves then and fumbled for them in his pocket. The smoke could only be endured a few seconds more. He caught hold the edge of the opening and tried to spring up. But the flames beat into his face and drove him down again.

For a moment he stood reeling, trying to think, trying to remember some resource, some avenue of escape. There was no furniture to stand on. If he could cover his face he might be able to leap part way through the opening and knock the burning logs apart. He tried to open his smarting eyes, but the lids were wracked with pain and would not at once respond. He made it at last, but the dense smoke was impervious to his vision. The firelight gave it a ghastly pallor.

His ax! With his ax he could chop the door away. His hand fumbled at his belt. But he remembered now; he lad left his ax outside the cabin, its blade thrust into the spruce log that had supplied his fuel.

Suddenly he saw himself face to face with seemingly certain death. It was curious that he did not feel more fear, greater revulsion. It was almost as if it didn't matter. While the steady sinking of the burning logs lessened, in some degree, the danger of the cabin igniting—a few inches of snow against the door remaining unmelted—the smoke clouds were swiftly and surely strangling him. Already his consciousness was departing. He leaped for the opening again and fell sprawling on the dirt floor. He started to spring up——

But he suddenly grew inert, breathing deeply. There was still air close to the ground. Strange he hadn't thought of it before,—just to lie still, face close to the dirt. It pained him to breathe; his eyes throbbed and burned, but at least it was life. He pressed his face to the cool earth.

Yet unconsciousness was sweeping him again. He would feel himself drifting, then with all the faltering power of his will he would struggle back. But perhaps this sweet oblivion was only sleep. His nerves were crying for rest. Once more he floated, and the hours of night crept by.

When Bill wakened again, the last pale glimmer of the lighted smoke was gone. He was bewildered at first, confusing reality with his dreams, but soon the full memory of the night's events swept back to him. His faculties had rallied now, his thought was clearer. The few hours that he had rested had been his salvation.

Yet it was still night. He raised his hands before his eyes but could not see even their outline. And the cabin was still full of smoke. But it seemed somewhat less dense now, less pungent. But the smarting in his eyes was more intense.

The fire had evidently burned down and out. He struggled to open his eyes, then gazed around the walls in search of the opening in the door. But he could not see the reflection of an ember. He fought his way to his feet.

His fumbling hands encountered the log walls; he then groped about till he found the plank door. His gloved hands smarted, but their sense of touch did no seem blunted. He had never known a darker night! Now that he found the hole in the door, it was curious that he could not see one star gleaming through. But perhaps clouds had overspread.

A measure of heat against his face told him that coals were still glowing under the ashes, yet he might be able to creep through. It was worth a trial: the smoke in the cabin was still almost unbearable. His muscles were more at his command now; with a great lurch he sprang up and thrust head and shoulders through the opening.

The hot ashes punished his face, and his hand encountered hot coals as he thrust them through. Yet with a mighty effort he pushed on until his wrists touched the icy snow. He knew that he was safe.

He stood erect, scarcely believing in his deliverance. And the snow had crusted during the night; it would almost hold him up without snowshoes. As soon as the light came, he could mush on toward his Twenty-three Mile cabin. It would be a cold and exhausting march, but he could make it. The night was bitter now, assailing him like a scourge the moment he left the warm cabin; and the temperature would continue to fall until after dawn. The wind still blew the snow dust—a stinging lash from the north and west—and it had brought the cold from the Bering Sea.

It was curious that a cloudy night could be so cold. Yet when he opened his eyes he could not see the gleam of a star. The red coals of the fire, too, were smothered and obscured in ashes. He stepped toward them, intending to rake them up for such heat as they could yield. Presently he halted, gazing with fascinated horror at the ground.

He was suddenly struck with a ghastly and terrible possibility. He could not give it credence, yet the thought seemed to seize and chill him like a great cold. But he would know the truth in a moment. It was always his creed: not to spare himself the truth. Surely it would simply be an interesting story—this of his great fear—when he returned with his backload of supplies to Virginia. Something to talk about, in the painful and embarrassed moments that remained before Virginia and her lover went out of his sight forever.

His hand groped for a match. In his eagerness it broke off at his fingers as he tried to strike it. But soon he found another.

He heard it crack in the silence, but evidently it was a dud! The darkness before his eyes remained unbroken.

Filled with a sick fear, he removed his glove and passed his hand over the upheld match. There was no longer a possibility for doubt. The tiny flame smarted his flesh.

"Blind!" he cried. "Out here in the snow and the forest—blind!"

It was true. The pungent wood smoke had done a cruel work. Until time should heal the wounds of the tortured lenses, Bill was blind.



XXIII

Standing motionless in the dreadful gloom of blindness, insensible to the growing cold, Bill made himself look his situation in the face. His mind was no longer blunt and dull. It was cool, analytic; he balanced one thing against another; he judged the per cent. of his chance. At present it did not occur to him to give up. It is never the way of the sons of the wilderness to yield without a fight. They know life in all its travail and pain, but also they know the Cold and Darkness and Fear that is death. No matter how long the odds are, the wilderness creature fights to his last breath. Bill had always fought; his life had been a great war of which birth was the reveille and death would be retreat.

He was wholly self-contained, his mind under perfect discipline. He would figure it all out and seek the best way through. Long, weary miles of trackless forest stretched between him and safety. There was no food in this cabin, no blankets; and the fire was out. His Twenty-three Mile cabin was only slightly less distant than the one he had left. And through those endless drifts and interminable forests the blind, unaided, could not find their way.

He could conceive of no circumstances whereby Virginia and Harold would come to look for him short of another day and night. They did not expect him back until the end of the present day; they could not possible start forth to seek him until another daylight. And this man knew what the forest and the cold would do to him in twenty-four hours. Already the cold was getting to him.

For all that he had no food, he knew that if he could keep warm he could survive until help came. Yet men cannot fast in these winter woods as they can in the South. The simple matter of inner fuel is a desperate and an essential thing. But he had no blankets, and without a fire he would die, speedily and surely. He didn't deceive himself on this point. He knew the northern winter only too well. A few hours of suffering, then a slow warmth that stole through the veins and was the herald of departure. He had been warmed through in the cabin, but that warmth would soon pass away. He wondered if he could rebuild the fire.

He was suddenly shaken with terror at the thought that already he did not know in what direction the fire and the cabin lay. He had become turned around when he strode out to light the match. Instantly he began to search for the cabin door. He went down on his hands in the snow, groping, then moved in a slow, careful circle. Just one little second's bewilderment, one variation from the circle, and he might lose the cabin altogether. That meant death! It could mean no other thing.

But in a moment the smoke blew into his face, and he advanced into the ashes. The next moment, by circling again, he found the cabin door. He leaned against it, breathing hard.

"It won't do, Bill," he told himself. "Hold steady—for one minute more."

A spruce log, the last segment of the tree he had cut, lay somewhere a few feet from his door. But he remembered it had fallen into a thicket of evergreen: could he find it now? The log would not burn until it was cut up with his ax: the ax would be hard to find in the pressing darkness. Even if he found it, even if he could cut kindling with his knife, he couldn't maintain a blaze. Building and mending a fire with green timber is a cruel task even with vision; and he knew as well as he knew the fact of his own life that it would be wholly impossible to the blind.

Then what was left? Only a deeper, colder darkness than this he knew now. Death was left—nothing else. In an hour, perhaps in a half-hour, possibly not until the night had gone and come again with its wind and its chill, the end would be the same. There was no light to guide him home, no landmarks that he could see.

Then his thought seized upon an idea so fantastic, seemingly so impossible of achievement, that at first he could not give it credence. His mind had flashed to those unfortunates that had sometimes lost their way in the dark chambers of an underground cavern and thence to that method by which they guarded against this danger. These men carried strings, unwinding them as they entered the cavern and following them out. He had not carried a string-end here, but he had made a trail! His snowshoe tracks probably were not yet obliterated under the wind-blown snow. Could he feel his way along them back to the cabin?

The miles were many and long, but he wouldn't have to creep on hands and knees all the way. Perhaps he could walk, stooped, touching the depressions in the snow at every step. In his own soul he did not believe that he had one chance in a hundred of making it through to safety. Crawling, creeping, groping from track to track would wear him out quickly. But was there any other course for him? If he didn't try that, would he have any alternative other than to lie still and die? He wasn't sure that he could even find the tracks in the snow, but if he were able to encircle the cabin at a radius of fifty feet he could not miss them. He groped about at the side of the cabin for his snowshoes.

He found them in a minute, then walked straight as he could fifty feet out from the door. Once more he went on hands and feet, groping in the icy snow. He started to make a great circle.

Fifteen feet farther he felt a break in the even surface. The snow had been so soft and his shoes had sunk so deep that the powdered flakes the wind had strewn during the night had only half filled his tracks. He started to follow them down.

He walked stooped, groping with one hand, and after an endless time his fingers dipped into dry, warm ashes.

Only for a fraction of a second did he fail to understand. And in the darkness and the silence the man's breath caught in what was almost a sob. He realized that he had followed the tracks in the wrong direction, and had traced them straight to the cabin door that he had just left.

It was only a matter of a hundred feet, but it was tragedy here. Once more he started on the out-trail.

He soon found that he could not walk in his present stooped position. Human flesh is not build to stand such a strain as that. Before he had gone half a mile sharp pains began to attack him, viciously, in the back and thighs. For all his magnificent strength—largely returned to him in his hours of rest—he could not progress in this position more than half a mile farther.

He took another course. He would walk ahead five paces, then drop down and grope again for the tracks. Sometimes he found them at once, often he had to go on his hands and feet and start to circle. Then, finding the trail, he would mush on for five steps more.

Oh, the way was cruel! He could not see to avoid the stinging lash of the spruce needles, the cruel blows of the branches. Already the attempt began to partake of a quality of nightmare,—a blind and stumbling advance over infinite difficulties through the infinity of time. It was like some torment of an evil Hereafter,—eternal, remorseless, wholly without hope. Many times he sprawled at full length, and always it was harder to force himself to his feet.

Five steps on, halting and groping, then five steps more: thus the lone figure journeyed through the winter forest. The seconds dragged into the minutes, the minutes into hours. The cold deepened; likely it was the bitter hour just after dawn. The hand with which he groped for the tracks had lost all power of feeling.

He could not judge distance or time. Already it seemed to him that he had been upon the journey endless hours. Because of the faint grayness before his eyes he judged it was broad daylight: perhaps already the day was giving over to darkness. He didn't know how far he had come. The only thought he had left was always to count his terrible five steps, and count five more.

Nothing else mattered. He had for the moment at least lost sight of all other things. His thought was not so clear now; it seemed to him that the forest was no longer silent. There were confused murmurings in his ear, a curious confusion and perplexity in his brain. It was hard to remember who he was and where he was going. Just to count his steps, stoop, grope and find the snowshoe trail, then journey on again.

He tried to increase the number of steps between his gropings—first six, then seven. Above seven, however, the trail was so hard to find that time was lost rather than gained. Yes, he thought it was still daylight. Sometimes he seemed to feel the sunlight on his face. He was not cold now, and even the pain was gone from his hips and thighs.

He was mistaken in this, however. The pain still sent its fearful messages to his brain, but in his growing stupor he was no longer aware of them. Even his hand didn't hurt him now. He wondered if it were frozen; yet it was still sensitive to the depressions in the drifts. It could still grope through the snow and find the tracks.

"I can't go on!" his voice suddenly spoke aloud. "I can't go—any more."

The words seemed to come from an inner man, without volition on his part. He was a little amazed to hear them. Yet the time had not yet come to stop and rest. The tracks still led him on.

Always, it seemed to him, he had to grope longer to find the indentations in the snow. The simple reason was that the motor centers of his brain had begun to be impaired by cold and exhaustion, and he could no longer walk in a straight line. He found out, however, that the trail usually lay to the right rather than to his left. He was taking a shorter step with his left than with his right—the same tendency that often makes a tried woodsman walk in a great circle—and he thus bore constantly to the left. Soon it became necessary to drop his formula down to six, then to the original five.

On and on, through the long hours. But the fight was almost done. Exhaustion and hunger, but cold most of all, were swiftly breaking him down. He advanced with staggering steps.

The indentations were more shallow now. The point where he had begun to break through the snow crust, because of the softening snow, was passed long ago: only because he was in a valley sheltered from the wind were the tracks manifest at all.

The time came at last when he could no longer get upon his feet. And now, like a Tithonus who could not die, he crawled along the snowshoe trail on is hands and knees. "I can't go on," he told himself. "I'm through!" Yet always his muscles made one movement more.

Suddenly he missed the trail. His hand groped in vain over the white crust. He crept on a few more feet, then as ever, began to circle. Soon his hand found an indentation in the snow crust, and he started to creep forward again.

But slowly the conviction grew upon him that he was crawling in a small circle,—the very circle he had just made. Some way, he had missed the snowshoe trail. He did not remember how on his journey out he had once been obliged to backtrack a hundred yards and start on at a new angle. He had merely come to that point from which he had turned back. He could not find the trail because he was at its end.

He could not remember that it was his own trail. How he came here, his purpose and his destination, were all lost and forgotten in the intricate mazes of the past. He had but one purpose, one theme,—to keep to his trail an journey on. He would make a bigger circle. He started to creep forward in the snow.

But as he waited, on hands and knees in the drifts, the Spirit of Mercy came down to him and gave him one moment of lucid thought. All at once full consciousness returned to him in a sweep as of a tide, and he remembered all that had occurred. He saw all things in their exact relations. And now he knew his course.

No longer would he struggle on, slave to the remorseless instinct of self-preservation. Was there any glory, any happiness at his journey's end that would pay him for the agony of one more forward step? He had waged a mighty battle; but now—in a flash—he realized that the spoil for which he had fought was not worth one moment of his hours of pain. He remembered Virginia, Harold, the mind and its revelation: he recalled that his mission had been merely an expedition after provisions so that the two could go out of his life. Was there any reason why he should fight for life, only to find death?

There was nothing in the distant cabin worth having now. He was suddenly crushed with bitterness at the thought that he had made this mighty effort for a goal not worth attaining. If he struggled on, even to success, the only thing that waited him was a moment of farewell with Virginia and the vision of her slipping away from him, into her lover's arms. When she departed only the forest and the darkness would be left, and he had these here.

It would be different if he felt Virginia still needed him. If he could win her any happiness by fighting on, the struggle would still be worth while. But she had Harold to show her the way through the winter woods. It was true that they would have to rely on the fallen grizzly for meat: an uncomfortable experience, but nothing to compare with any further movement through the cruel drifts. Harold would come back and claim the mine; perhaps he would even erect his own notice before his departure, and the Rutheford family would know the full fruits of their crime of long ago. But it didn't matter. The only thing that mattered now was rest and sleep.

Slowly he sank down in the snow.



XXIV

When the Chinook wind, moving northwest at a faster pace than the waterfowl move south, struck the home cabin, Virginia's first thought was for Bill. She heard it come, faint at first, then blustering, just as Bill had heard it; she saw it rock down a few dead trees, and she listened to its raging complaints at the window.

"I'll show you my might," it seemed to say. "You have dared my silent places, come into my fastness, but now I will have revenge. I'll pay you—in secret ways that you don't know."

It so happened that Harold's first thought was also of Bill. It was a curious fact that his heart seemed to leap as if the wind had smitten it. He knew what the Chinook could do to a snow crust. He estimated that Bill was about halfway between the two cabins, and he didn't know about the little, deserted cabin where Bill could find refuge during the night. His eyes gleamed with high anticipations.

Harold's thought was curiously intertwined with the remembrance of the dark cavern he had entered yesterday, the gravel laden with gold. If indeed all things went as it seemed likely that they would go, Bill would never carry the word of his find down to the recorder's office. It was something to think of, something to dream about. Yellow gold,—and no further trouble in seeking it. Such a development would also save the labor of further planning. It was a friend of his, this wind at the window.

"Won't this Chinook melt the snow crust?" Virginia asked him.

He started. He hadn't realized that this newfound sweetheart of his knew the ways of Chinook winds and snow crusts. "Oh, no," he responded. "Why should it? Wind makes crusts, not softens them."

Virginia was satisfied for the moment. Then her mind went back to certain things Bill had told her on one of their little expeditions. Strangely, she took Bill's word rather than Harold's.

"But this is a warm wind, Harold," she objected. "If the crust is melted Bill can't possibly get through to his Twenty-three Mile cabin to-night. What will he do?"

"He'll make it through. The crust won't melt that fast, if it melts at all. He may have a long, hard tramp, though. Don't worry, Virginia, he'll be coming in to-morrow night—with his back loaded with food."

"I only wish I hadn't let him go." The girl's tone was heavy and dull.

"But we have to have supplies——"

"We could have gone out on that grizzly meat. It was so foolish to risk his life, and I had a presentiment too."

He was glad that she had had a presentiment. It tended to verify his fondest dreams. But he laughed at her, and falling into one of his most brilliant moods, tried to entertain her. Her interest was hard to hold to-day. Her mind kept dwelling on Bill, mushing on through the softening snow, and her eyes kept seeking the window.

She cooked lunch and burned every dish. Then, no longer able to deny her own fears, she ventured out in the snow to test its crust. She put on her snowshoes, starting a little way down Bill's trail. She was white-faced and sick of heart when she returned.

"Harold, I'm worried," she cried. "I tried to walk in this snow—and you can talk about Bill making it through all you want, but I won't believe you. A hundred steps has tired me out."

He was beginning to be a little angry with her fears. And he made the mistake of answering rather impatiently.

"Well, what can you do about it? he's gone, hasn't he, and we can't call him back."

"I suppose not. But if I—we—were out there in that soft snow, and he was here, he'd find something to do about it! He'd come racing out there to us—bringing food an blankets——"

"Oh, he'd be a hero!" Harold scorned. "Listen, Virginia—there's nothing in the world to fear. The Chinook sprang up at nine——"

"Oh, it was much later than that."

"I looked at my watch," the man lied. "He was only well started then; he's woodsman enough to turn around and come back if there's danger. You may see him before dark."

"I pray that I will! And if—if—anything has happened to him——"

All at once the tears leaped to her eyes. She couldn't restrain them any more than the earth can constrain the rain. She turned into her own curtained-off portion of the cabin so that Harold could not see.

The afternoon that followed was endlessly long, and lonely. Her heart sank at the every complaint of the wind, and she dreaded the fall of the shadows. Three times she thrilled with inexpressible joy at a sound on the threshold, but always it was just the wind, mocking her distress.

She saw the sinister, northern night growing between the spruce trees, and she dreaded it as never before. She cooked a meager supper—the supplies were almost gone—but she had no heart to sit up and talk with Harold. At last she went behind her curtain, hoping to forget her fears in sleep.

All through the hours of early night she slept only at intervals: dozing, coming to herself in starts and jerks, and dreaming miserably. The hours passed, and still Bill did not return.

Her imagination was only too vivid. In her thoughts she could see this stalwart woodsman of hers camping somewhere in the snowdrifts, blanketless, staying awake through the bitter night to mend the fire, and perhaps in trouble. She knew something of the northern cold that was assailing him, hovering, waiting for the single instant when his fire should go down or when he should drop off to sleep. Oh, it was patient, remorseless. He was likely hungry, too, and despairing.

She wakened before dawn; and the icy, winter stars were peering through the cabin window. Surely Bill had returned by now: yet it would hardly be like him to come in and not let her know of his safe return. He had always seemed so well to understand her fears, he was always so thoughtful. There was no use trying to go back to sleep until she knew for certain. She slipped from her bed onto the floor of the icy cabin.

She missed the cozy warmth of the fire; but, shivering, she slipped quickly into her clothes. Then she lighted a candle and put on her snowshoes. She mushed across the little space of snow to the men's cabin.

The east was just beginning to pale: the stars seemed lucid as ever in the sky. There was a labyrinth of them, uncounted millions that gleamed and twinkled in every little rift between the spruce trees. Even the stars of lesser magnitude that through the smoke of her native city had never revealed themselves were out in full array to-night. And the icy air stabbed like knives the instant she left the cabin door. It was the coldest hour she had ever known.

She knocked on Harold's door, then waited for a reply. But the cabin was ominously silent. Her fears increased: she knew that if Bill were present he would have wakened at her slightest sound. He would have seemed to know instinctively that she was there. She knocked again, louder.

"Who's there?" a sleepy voice answered. Virginia felt a world of impatience at the dull, drowsy tones. Harold had been able to sleep! He wasn't worrying over Bill's safety.

"It's I—Virginia. I'm up and dressed. Did Bill come back?"

"Bill? No—and what in God's earth are you up this early for? Forget about Bill and go back to bed."

"Listen, Harold," she pleaded. "Don't tell me to go back to bed. I feel—I know something's happened to him. He couldn't have gone on clear to the cabin in that awful snow; he either started back or camped. In either case, he's in trouble—freezing or exhausted. And—and—I want you to go out and look for him."

Harold was fully awake now, and he had some difficulty in controlling his voice. In the first place he had no desire to rescue Bill. In the second, he was angry and bitterly jealous at her concern for him. "You do, eh—you'd like to send me out on a bitter night like this on a fool's errand such as that. Where is there a cabin along the way—you'd only kill me without helping him."

"Nonsense, Harold. You could take that big caribou robe and some food, and if you had to camp out it wouldn't kill you. Please get up and go, Harold." Her tone now was one of pleading. "Oh, I want you to——"

"Go back to bed!" But Harold remembered, soon, that he wasn't talking to his squaw, and his voice lost its impatient note. "Don't worry about Bill any more. He'll come in all right. I'm not going out on any wild-goose chase like that—on a day such as to-day will be. You'll see I'm right when you think about it."