The Literary World Seventh Reader Part 23

"Listen," she said, and shook his shoulder. "Look! I want to get you up against that rock."

"Won't make much difference," replied Trafford, and opened his eyes.

"Where?" he asked.

"There."

He remained quite quiet for a second perhaps. "Listen to me," he said.

"Go back to camp."

"Yes," she said.

"Go back to camp. Make a pack of all the strongest food--strenthin'--strengthrin' food--you know?" He seemed unable to express himself.

"Yes," she said.

"Down the river. Down--down. Till you meet help."

"Leave you?"

He nodded his head and winced.

"You're always plucky," he said. "Look facts in the face. Children.

Thought it over while you were coming." A tear oozed from his eye.

"Don't be a fool, Madge. Kiss me good-by. Don't be a fool. I'm done.

Children."

She stared at him and her spirit was a luminous mist of tears. "You old _coward_," she said in his ear, and kissed the little patch of rough and b.l.o.o.d.y cheek beneath his eye. Then she knelt up beside him. "_I'm_ boss now, old man," she said. "I want to get you to that place there under the rock. If I drag, can you help?"

He answered obstinately: "You'd better go."

"I'll make you comfortable first," she returned.

He made an enormous effort, and then, with her quick help and with his back to her knee, had raised himself on his elbows.

"And afterward?" he asked.

"Build a fire."

"Wood?"

"Down there."

"Two bits of wood tied on my leg--splints. Then I can drag myself. See?

Like a blessed old walrus."

He smiled and she kissed his bandaged face again.

"Else it hurts," he apologized, "more than I can stand."

She stood up again, put his rifle and knife to his hand, for fear of that lurking wolf, abandoning her own rifle with an effort, and went striding and leaping from rock to rock toward the trees below. She made the chips fly, and was presently towing three venerable pine dwarfs, b.u.mping over rock and crevice, back to Trafford. She flung them down, stood for a moment bright and breathless, then set herself to hack off the splints he needed from the biggest stem. "Now," she said, coming to him.

"A fool," he remarked, "would have made the splints down there.

You're--_good_, Marjorie."

She lugged his leg out straight, put it into the natural and least painful pose, padded it with moss and her torn handkerchief, and bound it up. As she did so a handful of snowflakes came whirling about them.

She was now braced up to every possibility. "It never rains," she said grimly, "but it pours," and went on with her bone-setting. He was badly weakened by pain and shock, and once he spoke to her sharply. "Sorry,"

he said a moment later.

She rolled him over on his chest, and left him to struggle to the shelter of the rock while she went for more wood.

The sky alarmed her. The mountains up the valley were already hidden by driven rags of slaty snowstorms. This time she found a longer but easier path for dragging her boughs and trees; she determined she would not start the fire until nightfall, nor waste any time in preparing food until then. There were dead boughs for kindling--more than enough. It was snowing quite fast by the time she got up to him with her second load, and a premature twilight already obscured and exaggerated the rocks and mounds about her. She gave some of her cheese to Trafford, and gnawed some herself on her way down to the wood again. She regretted that she had brought neither candles nor lantern, because then she might have kept on until the cold night stopped her, and she reproached herself bitterly because she had brought no tea. She could forgive herself the lantern, for she had never expected to be out after dark, but the tea was inexcusable. She muttered self-reproaches while she worked like two men among the trees, panting puffs of mist that froze upon her lips and iced the knitted wool that covered her chin. "Why don't they teach a girl to handle an ax?" she cried.

II

When at last the wolfish cold of the Labrador night had come, it found Trafford and Marjorie seated almost warmly on a bed of pine boughs between the sheltering dark rock behind and a big but well-husbanded fire in front, drinking a queer-tasting but not unsavory soup of lynx-flesh, which she had fortified with the remainder of the brandy.

Then they tried roast lynx and ate a little, and finished with some sc.r.a.ps of cheese and deep draughts of hot water.

The snowstorm poured incessantly out of the darkness to become flakes of burning fire in the light of the flames, flakes that vanished magically, but it only reached them and wetted them in occasional gusts. What did it matter for the moment if the dim snowheaps rose and rose about them?

A glorious fatigue, an immense self-satisfaction, possessed Marjorie; she felt that they had both done well.

"I am not afraid of to-morrow now," she said at last.

Trafford was smoking his pipe and did not speak for a moment. "Nor I,"

he said at last. "Very likely we'll get through with it." He added after a pause: "I thought I was done for. A man--loses heart--after a loss of blood."

"The leg's better?"

"Hot as fire." His humor hadn't left him. "It's a treat," he said. "The hottest thing in Labrador."

Later Marjorie slept, but on a spring as it were, lest the fire should fall. She replenished it with boughs, tucked in the half-burnt logs, and went to sleep again. Then it seemed to her that some invisible hand was pouring a thin spirit on the flames that made them leap and crackle and spread north and south until they filled the heavens with a gorgeous glow. The snowstorm was overpast, leaving the sky clear and all the westward heaven alight with the trailing, crackling, leaping curtains of the [v]aurora, brighter than she had ever seen them before. Quite clearly visible beyond the smolder of the fire, a wintry waste of rock and snow, boulder beyond boulder, pa.s.sed into a [v]dun obscurity. The mountain to the right of them lay long and white and stiff, a shrouded death. All earth was dead and waste, and the sky alive and coldly marvelous, signalling and astir. She watched the changing, shifting colors, and they made her think of the gathering banners of inhuman hosts, the stir and marshaling of icy giants for ends stupendous and indifferent to all the trivial impertinence of man's existence! Marjorie felt a pa.s.sionate desire to pray.

The bleak, slow dawn found Marjorie intently busy. She had made up the fire, boiled water and washed and dressed Trafford's wounds, and made another soup of lynx. But Trafford had weakened in the night; the soup nauseated him; he refused it and tried to smoke and was sick, and then sat back rather despairfully after a second attempt to persuade her to leave him there to die. This failure of his spirit distressed her and a little astonished her, but it only made her more resolute to go through with her work. She had awakened cold, stiff and weary, but her fatigue vanished with movement; she toiled for an hour replenishing her pile of fuel, made up the fire, put his gun ready to his hand, kissed him, abused him lovingly for the trouble he gave her until his poor torn face lit in response, and then parting on a note of cheerful confidence, set out to return to the hut. She found the way not altogether easy to make out; wind and snow had left scarcely a trace of their tracks, and her mind was full of the stores she must bring and the possibility of moving Trafford nearer to the hut. She was startled to see by the fresh, deep spoor along the ridge how near the wolf had dared approach them in the darkness.

Ever and again Marjorie had to halt and look back to get her direction right. As it was, she came through the willow scrub nearly half a mile above the hut, and had to follow the steep bank of the frozen river.

Once she nearly slipped upon an icy slope of rock.

One possibility she did not dare to think of during that time--a blizzard now would cut her off absolutely from any return to Trafford.

Short of that, she believed she could get through.

Her quick mind was full of all she had to do. At first she had thought chiefly of Trafford's immediate necessities, of food and some sort of shelter. She had got a list of things in her head--meat extract, bandages, [v]corrosive sublimate by way of antiseptic, brandy, a tin of beef, some bread, and so forth; she went over it several times to be sure of it, and then for a time she puzzled about a tent. She thought she could manage a bale of blankets on her back, and that she could rig a sleeping tent for herself and Trafford out of them and some bent sticks. The big tent would be too much to strike and shift. And then her mind went on to a bolder enterprise, which was to get him home. The nearer she could bring him to the log hut, the nearer they would be to supplies.

She cast about for some sort of sledge. The snow was too soft and broken for runners, especially among the trees, but if she could get a flat of smooth wood, she thought she might be able to drag him. She decided to try the side of her bunk, which she could easily get off. She would have, of course, to run it edgewise through the thickets and across the ravine, but after that she would have almost clear going up to the steep place of broken rocks within two hundred yards of him. The idea of a sledge grew upon her, and she planned to nail a rope along the edge and make a kind of harness for herself.

Marjorie found the camping-place piled high with drifted snow, which had invaded tent and hut, and that some beast, a wolverine she guessed, had been into the hut, devoured every candle-end and the uppers of Trafford's well-greased second boots, and had then gone to the corner of the store-shed and clambered up to the stores. She took no account of its [v]depredations there, but set herself to make a sledge and get her supplies together. There was a gleam of sunshine, though she did not like the look of the sky and she was horribly afraid of what might be happening to Trafford. She carried her stuff through the wood and across the ravine, and returned for her improvised sledge. She was still struggling with that among the trees when it began to snow again.

It was hard then not to be frantic in her efforts. As it was, she packed her stuff so loosely on the planking that she had to repack it, and she started without putting on her snowshoes, and floundered fifty yards before she discovered that omission. The snow was now falling fast, darkling the sky and hiding everything but objects close at hand, and she had to use all of her wits to determine her direction: she knew she must go down a long slope and then up to the ridge, and it came to her as a happy inspiration that if she bore to the left she might strike some recognizable vestige of her morning's trail. She had read of people walking in circles when they have no light or guidance, and that troubled her until she bethought herself of the little compa.s.s on her watch chain. By that she kept her direction. She wished very much she had timed herself across the waste, so that she could tell when she approached the ridge.