The Snowshoe Trail Part 9

"Yes. Even this cataract freezes, but it likely won't be safe to cross for some weeks--maybe clear into January or February. That depends on the weather. You see, Miss Tremont, we don't have the awful low temperatures early in the winter they get further east and north. We're on the wet side of the mountains. But we do get the snow, week after week of it when you simply can't travel, and plenty of thirty and forty, sometimes more, below zero. But the river will freeze if we give it time. And the snow will pack and crust late in the winter. And then, in those clear, cold days, we can make a sled and mush out."

"And it means--we're tied up here for weeks--and maybe months?"

"That's it. Just as sure as if we had iron chains around our ankles."

Then the girl's tears flowed again, unchecked. Bill stood beside her, his shoulders drooping, but in no situation of his life had he ever felt more helpless, more incapable of aid. "Don't cry," he pleaded. "Don't cry, Miss Tremont. I'll take care of you. Don't you know I will?"

Her grief rent him to the depths, but there was nothing he could say or do. He drew the blankets higher about her.

"Perhaps you can get some more sleep," he urged. "Your body's torn to pieces, of course."

Fearful and lonely and miserable, the girl cried herself to sleep. Bill sat beside her a long time, and the snow sifted down in the forest and the silence lay over the land. He left her at last, and for a while was busy among the supplies that he found on a shelf behind the stove. And she wakened to find him bending over her.

His face was anxious and his eyes gentle as a woman's. "Do you think you can eat?" he asked. "I've warmed up soup--and I've got coffee, too."

He had put the liquids in cups and had drawn the little table beside her bed. She shook her head, but she softened at the swift look of disappointment in his face. "I'll take some coffee," she told him.

He held the cup for her, and she drank a little of the bracing liquid.

Then she pushed the cup away.

He waited beside a moment, curiously anxious. "Give me your hand," he said.

"Why?"

Cold was her voice, and cold the expression on her face. It seemed to her that the lines of Bill's face deepened, and his dark eyes grew stern. But in a moment the expression pa.s.sed, and she knew she had wounded him. "Why do you think? I want to test your pulse."

He had seen that she was flushed, and he was in deadly fear that the plunge into the cold waters had worked an organic injury. He took her soft, slender wrist in his hand, and she felt the pressure of his little finger against her pulsing arteries. Then she saw the dark features light up.

"You haven't any fever," he told her joyfully. "You're just used up from the experience. And G.o.d knows I can't blame you. Go to sleep again if you like."

She dozed off again, and for a little while he was busy outside the cabin, cutting fuel for the night's blaze. He stole in once to look at her and then turned again down the moose trail to the river. He had been certain before that the others had gone; now he only wanted to make sure.

The long afternoon was at an end when he returned. He had gazed across the gray waters and called again and again, but except for the echo of his shout, the wilderness silence had been inviolate. Virginia was awake, but still miserable and dejected in her blankets. They talked a little, softly and quietly, about their chances, but he saw that she was not yet in a frame of mind to look the situation squarely in the face.

Then he cooked the last meal of the day.

"I don't want anything," she told him, when again he proffered food. "I only want to die. I wish I had died--in the river last night. Months and months--in these awful woods and this awful cabin--and nothing but death in the end."

He did not condemn her for the utterance, even in his thoughts. He was imaginative enough to understand her despair and sympathize with it. He remembered the sheltered life she had always lived. Besides, she was his G.o.ddess; he could only humble himself before her.

"But I won't let you die, Miss Tremont. I'll care for you. You won't even have to lift your hand, if you don't want to. You'll be happier, though, if you do; it would break some of the monotony. There's a little old phonograph on the stand, and some old magazines under your cot. The weeks will pa.s.s someway. And I promise this." He paused, and his face was gray as ashes. "I won't impose--any more of my company upon you--than you wish."

The response was instantaneous. The girl's heart warmed; then she flashed him a smile of sympathy and understanding. "Forgive me," she said. "I'll try to be brave. I'll try to stiffen up. I know you'll do everything you can to get me out. You're so good to me--so kind. And now--I only want to go to sleep."

He watched her, standing by her bed. After all, sleep was the best thing for her--to knit her torn nerves and mend her tired body.

Besides, the wilderness night was falling. He could see it already, gray against the window pane. The first day of their exile was gone.

"I'll be all right in the morning," she told him sleepily. "And maybe it's for the best--after all. At least--it gives you a better chance to find Harold--and bring him back to me."

Bill nodded, but he didn't trust himself to speak.

IX

There is a certain capacity in young and st.u.r.dy human beings for accepting the inevitable. When Virginia wakened the next morning, her physical distress was largely past and she was in a much better frame of mind. She pulled herself together, stiffened her young spine, and prepared to make the best of a deplorable situation. She had come up here to find her lost beloved, and she wasn't defeated yet. This very development might bring success.

She realized that the fact that she had thus found a measure of compensation for the disaster would have been largely unintelligible to most of the girls of her cla.s.s,--the girls she knew in the circle in which she had moved. It was not the accustomed thing to remain faithful to a fiance who had been silent an missing for six years, or to seek him in the dreary s.p.a.ces of the North. The matter got down to the simple fact that these girls were of a different breed. Culture and sophistication and caste had never destroyed an intensity and depths of elemental pa.s.sion that might have been native to these very wildernesses in which she was imprisoned. Cool an self-restrained to the finger tips, she knew the full meaning of fidelity. Orphaned almost in babyhood, she had lived a lonely life: this girlhood love affair of hers had been her single, great adventure. She had been sure that her lover still lived when all her friends had judged him dead. Months and years she had dreamed of finding him, of sheltering again in his arms, and proving to all the world that her faith was justified.

Bill was already up, and the room warmed from the fire. The noise of his ax blows had wakened her. And she took advantage of his absence to dress.

"You up?" he cried in delight when she entered. His arms were heaped with wood. "I'm not sure that you hadn't ought to rest another day.

How do you feel?"

"As good as ever, as far as I can tell. And pretty well ashamed of being such a baby yesterday."

But his smile told her that he held no resentment. "I trust you'll be able to eat to-day?"

"Eat? Bill, I am famished. But first"--and her face grew instantly sober--"I want to know just how we stand, and what our chances are. I remember what you told me yesterday about getting out. But we can't live here on nothing. What about supplies?"

"That's what we've got to see about right now. It's an important matter, true enough. For a certain very good reason I couldn't make a real investigation till you got up. You'll see why in a minute. Well, we have a gun at least; you can see it behind the stove. It's an old thing, but it will still shoot. And we've got at least one box of sh.e.l.ls for it--and not one of them must be wasted. They mean our meat supply. I'm still wearing my pistol, and I've got two boxes of sh.e.l.ls for it in my pocket--it's a small caliber, and there's fifty in each box. There are plenty of blankets and cooking utensils, magazines for idle hours and, Heaven bless us, an old and battered phonograph on the table. Don't scorn it--anything that has to be packed on a horse this far mustn't be scorned. We can have music with our meals, if we like."

He stopped and smiled.

"There's a cake of soap on the shelf," he went on, after the gorgeous fact of the phonograph had time to sink home, "and another among the supplies--but I'm afraid cold cream and toilet water are lacking. I don't even know how you'll comb your hair."

The girl smiled--really with happiness now--and fished in the pockets of a great slicker coat she had worn the night of the disaster.

She produced a little white roll, and with the high glee opened it for him to see. Wrapped in a miniature face towel was her comb, a small brush, and a toothbrus.h.!.+

They laughed with delight over the find. "But no mirror?" the man said solemnly.

"No. I won't be able to see how I look for weeks--and that's terrible. But where are your food supplies? I see those sacks hanging from the ceiling--but they certainly haven't enough to keep us alive.

And there's nothing else that I can see."

"We'd have a hard time, if we had to depend on the contents of those sacks. Miss Tremont, can you cook?"

"Cook? Good Heavens--I never have. But I can learn, I suppose."

"You'd better learn. It will help pa.s.s away the time. I'll be busy getting meat and keeping the fires high, among other things."

"But what is there to cook?"

He walked, with some triumph, to the bunk on which she had slept the night before, and lifting it up, revealed a great box beneath. She understood, now, why he had not been able to make a previous investigation. They danced with joy at its contents,--bags of rice and beans, dried apples, marmalade and canned goods, enough for some weeks at least. Best of all, from Bill's point of view, there were a few aged and ripened plugs of tobacco, for cutting up for his pipe.

"The one thing we haven't got is meat," Bill told her, "except a little jerky; but there's plenty of that in the woods if we can just find it.

And I don't intend to delay about that. If the snow gets much deeper, we'd have to have snowshoes to hunt at all."

"You mean--to go hunting to-day?"

"As soon as we can stir up a meal. How would pancakes taste?"