The Snowshoe Trail Part 20

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 sh.e.l.ls 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 embarra.s.s 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 ent.i.tled 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 d.a.m.ning 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 G.o.d 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 l.u.s.trous eyes. The man thrilled to the last little nerve. In her comradeship for him their l.u.s.ter 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.