Judith of the Godless Valley Part 66

He fed the horses, ate some biscuits and bacon, both frozen, and started downward. Shortly snow began to fall, but he had no difficulty in following trail until mid-afternoon. Then he paused on the low shoulder.

There were scrub pines in which Judith had made a camp. The snow had thickened until Doug could see scarcely ten feet ahead. He was utterly weary and very cold. He knew that he ought to go into camp for the night but he could not. He tied the horses beneath the trees, a grateful, windless haven to the poor brutes, and went slowly on to reconnoiter.

Judith's tracks continued abruptly down the slope. Douglas followed for a few feet, then stopped. A horse had fallen here and rolled down the steep left wall. He dropped to his knees and followed the wide, snow-packed trail. He had not far to go. From the snow drifted over a rock protruded a horse's hoof. Doug swept the body free of snow. It was old Buster, with his right fore leg broken and a bullet wound in his head. Hot tears scalded Doug's wind-tortured eyes. After a moment of search for further details of the catastrophe, he crawled up the wall again and, after a frantic hunt, found a blurred single horse trail leading on from the spot whence Buster had slipped. He went back for his own horses, mounted Tom and pushed on downward.

But he could not continue long. It was soon dusk and he dared not risk losing Judith's tracks. When he came upon the next cedar clump, clinging precariously to the mountainside, he dismounted. Under the shelter of the trees, he fastened the horses. He trampled the snow for his fire-place and chopped a night's supply of wood. After he had eaten a hot supper, he wrapped himself in his blankets and huddled over the fire, consumed by anxiety.

The wind rushed by the cedars without pause. The hard, dry pellets of snow rattled on the trees. The horses, their chins hung with icicles, stood with bowed heads, motionless.

All of Doug's life pa.s.sed in review before his sleepless eyes. He could not recall when he had not been shaping his days around Judith. Even when as children they had lived the snarling life of young pups, she had been the center of his universe. He wondered if love came to many men as it had come to him. He had not observed it in any other man in Lost Chief. Perhaps Peter had cared so. Perhaps in the outside world it was not infrequent. But whether it was a common sort of love or not, he could not picture himself without Judith in his life. If he should find her dead, farther down on this ghastly mountainside, he knew that the light and warmth within him would go out and that he never would finish the journey.

One by one he went over the steps of the past year that had culminated in this trip over Black Devil Pa.s.s. He realized that every step had been the result of his own years of mental conflict. Yet he could not see how he could have failed to take each step as he had taken it. His mind mysteriously refused to present an alternative. And, thinking thus, he was conscious of a sense of spiritual helplessness as if he were being borne on and on by forces quite beyond his control. And there came to him a sudden and shattering conviction that this terrible night of loneliness had been inevitable since the day of his birth. Call it Fate, he told himself, call it Destiny, call it what we might, something stronger than his own will had shaped his days toward this awful expedition. Awful, he thought, not from the physical aspect--he had endured as much in other ways--as from the quality of the events that had brought the expedition about. It was all wrong that Judith should have been in the state of mind that made it possible for her to put herself to such a wild flight. Revolt, the Mormon's wife had said it was. Revolt against what? Surely against something stupendous, something that a man was powerless to help her to free herself from or to bear.

Ah, Judith! Judith! Judith all fire, all wistfulness, all strength and beauty! What was he, after all, to hope to claim her, or even having won her, how was he to keep her? How was he to keep within his ken that restless, soaring spirit? What could he give her that would satisfy, and hold her? For the first time in many years, Douglas could have wept; wept for very sadness that Judith should be so lonely and so wistful.

How long he sat shivering with his burning eyes on the fire, Douglas did not know. He was roused by a faint cry above the wind. At first he thought it was a coyote. But when it repeated, he started to his feet and concentrated in an agony of attention on the sound. Once more it came, longdrawn, troubled, the howl of a dog. Doug dropped the blankets and strode from the shelter of the trees to deliver a long coo-ee. The wind was against him. There was no response.

He hurriedly dragged his entire supply of firewood before the shelter and set it to blazing. Then he plunged on foot downward through the wind-swept, snow-driven darkness.

It was a terrible journey. He slipped and fell so often and so far that when the light behind him dwindled to a faint point, he dared continue no farther. Standing waist-deep in snow, he whistled and called. But the cyclone wind drove the sound back into his teeth. Sick at soul, he prepared to turn back. He beat his arms across his chest, stamped his feet, slipped, and once more rolled downward. He brought up with a crash in a cedar clump. A dog barked and threw himself against Doug with a snarl that changed at once to a whine of joy.

"Wolf Cub! Wolf Cub! Where is she?"

He grasped the dog's collar. It was very dark beneath the trees. Wolf Cub led him forward for a few feet. He stumbled over a soft, huddled form. He rolled to his knees and pulled a blanket aside. Judith!--her head pillowed on her knees.

"Judith! Judith!" No reply. Doug put the blanket over her again and, with hands like frozen clods, jerked out his sheath ax and with infinite difficulty lopped off a cedar bough and got a fire to going. Sifting snow pellets, and the little wild mare's beautiful anxious eyes and drifted forelock, then that form beneath the blanket. Douglas heaped the fire high, then hurled the blanket away.

"Judith! Judith! Judith!" Sobbing, he crouched beside her, gathered her in his arms, laid her cold face in his breast, tried to enwrap her body with his.

"Judith! Judith!"

Wolf Cub whined in eager circles. Douglas laid his cheek against her lips. A faint warmth. He shook her, frantically, and beat her hands with his. Then he rose and balanced her on her feet. She hung limply in his arms. He huddled her before the fire again and forced some whiskey down her throat. He manipulated her inert body until when he lifted her again onto her feet she was able to stand. Still half in his arms. Then he forced her to stumble back and forth beside the fire.

"Judith! Judith! Judith!"

"It's you, Doug!" weakly and with bewildered eyes.

"O Jude, how could you! How could you!"

"Poor Buster--dead!" muttered Judith.

"I know! I found him. You must keep going, Judith. Lean on me but keep going."

But circulation was returning to her strong young body. Shortly she was able to stand alone and to ask Doug where he had come from.

"My camp is up the mountain a ways. Why didn't you have a fire?"

"Lost my pack when I lost Buster. Lost my match-safe when I fell with the little wild mare this afternoon."

"I'm going to take you back up to my camp, Judith."

"I don't think I can make it, Doug. It would have to be a foot climb."

"You must make it. There is nothing at all here to keep us both from freezing to death. We'll start now, while I can still see the fire I left up there."

"I can't, Doug! You bring your camp down here."

"This is no shelter at all. I'm in the big cedars above here. You've got to have some hot food right off. We will leave the little wild mare here until morning."

With Wolf Cub hanging to their heels, they started the upward climb.

Judith gave to the last ounce of her depleted strength. They reached the still glowing ashes of Doug's fire on their hands and knees, and lay beside it till the warning chill brought Douglas to his feet. He chopped more wood, rekindled the fire in the center of the camp, and established Judith beside it on some blankets. Then he prepared some coffee and bacon for her. She ate ravenously. Douglas watched her with satisfaction radiating from every line of his snow-burned face.

"Are you warm now, Jude?" he asked her when she had begun on her second cup of coffee.

"Well, not exactly warm, but I sure am thawing!"

"As soon as you are warm, I'll let you sleep. That's right, let old Wolf Cub snuggle up against you. He's better than a hot-water bottle. Are you surprised to see me, Judith?"

She looked up at him through weary eyes that still held the old unquenchable fires in their depths.

"I didn't know. If you had gone off on a long hunt for the sky pilot, you wouldn't have heard yet that I was gone. Did you find him?"

"I never even got to look for him. I was down at Inez' trying to sweat some truth out of Scott when your mother came in with word you were gone. Peter and I started after you at once."

"Peter! Where is he?"

"Jude, let's keep our stories until morning. Things look different, then. And you are all in."

"So are you!"

"I'm not as bad off as you. Let me tuck you up, dear. When you've had a sleep, you can give me my turn."

Too done up to protest, Judith allowed Douglas to wrap her in blankets and, with the Wolf Cub snuggled against her back, she dropped into slumber. Douglas set himself to the task of keeping the fire going. The snow ceased at midnight and the cold grew more intense. Douglas chopped wood or walked up and down before the fire to fight off the snow stupor which constantly menaced him. When the lethargy was too heavy to be controlled by exercise alone, he stooped over Judith and, lifting the corner of the blanket which covered her face, he would gaze at her with such joy and thankfulness as he never before had experienced. Whatever the future might bring forth, he had her safe and warm for to-night. And he wished that he believed in a G.o.d that he might thank Him!

CHAPTER XVIII

ELIJAH NELSON'S RANCH

"Call it Fate, call it Destiny, something stronger than my own will is shaping my destiny."

--_Douglas Spencer_.

At dawn Judith stirred, blinked at Douglas, and sat up, staring. Her eyes were bloodshot and deep sunk in her head, but her look was full of energy, nevertheless. Douglas was standing on the opposite side of the fire.

"Have you been up all night?" she demanded.