Part 62

"No can follow in the snow!" she said contemptuously.

At every hint of stoppage, Garth's blood surged dangerously upward. He pressed his knuckles against his temples, and strove to think. The two horses, instinctively drawing close together, turned their tails to the driving flakes. Rina sat hunched in her saddle, as indifferent as a squat, clay image.

"I will ride on," he said thickly.

She gave no sign.

He consulted his compass. "We have ridden due northwest all the way," he said. "Where are they heading for?"

"Death River, I guess," she answered, pointing. "The crossing is northwest."

"How far?" he demanded.

"Two days' journey, maybe seventy-five miles."

"You wait for the boy in the shelter of the poplar bluff across the coulée," he said. "When the snow stops, follow on as well as you can."

"Charley not come any more," said Rina in a tone of quiet fatalism. "When snow hide our track, he walk round and round. Bam-by he fall down, and not get up. He die. He know that."

Garth, ready to push into the storm, reined up again. Her sureness chilled his impatient hurry; and the oft-told tragedies of prairie snowstorms recurred to him.

"Die in the snow!" he repeated dully, hanging in agonizing indecision between the two images; Natalie ahead, and the solitary boy plodding behind. On the one hand he thought: "The storm has held them up, somewhere just ahead! It is my only chance of overtaking them!" and then he turned his horse's head north. But the other thought would not down. "The kid knew it meant death to walk; and he chose it!" Garth finally led the way back over the coulée.

Rina had no difficulty making herself comfortable among the young poplar trees. She improvised a shelter out of a blanket stretched over two inclined saplings; and in front of it she built a fire. Garth meanwhile changed to the fresher horse, and started back over their own dimming trail.

"You never find him now," Rina said hopelessly, as he left her.

Garth merely set his jaw.

His watch told him it was past eleven. He calculated they had covered five miles between the two coulées, and that it would be about twenty-five miles all told back to their own camping-place. Supposing the boy to have averaged three miles an hour, he would now be some twelve miles away, and if he kept walking, Garth, at his present pace, should come upon him in an hour and a half's riding.

The marks of their previous passage were soon completely obliterated; and thereafter Garth rode compass in hand. With the wind behind, his horse showed a better stomach for travelling; and he made the first coulée in something under an hour. Here a little search revealed the half-burned logs of Grylls's fire under the snow; and this put him directly in the path again. He stood up the logs, to make a better mark against his return.

He began to keep a sharp lookout for the boy, frequently shouting his name. His voice, muffled by the thickly falling flakes, had an odd, deadened ring in his own ears; and he doubted if he could be heard very far. When he considered the vast width of the prairie, and the extreme improbability of two figures, shaping opposite courses, meeting point-blank in the middle of it, he was ready to despair of finding the boy. It maddened him to think how close they might pass, without either being aware.

Later, he adopted another expedient. Every fifteen minutes he turned his horse at right angles to his course, and galloping far to the right and left searched the snow for human tracks; then, picking up his trail where he left it, he would push a little farther ahead. In this way he could sweep a path about a mile wide on the prairie.

But the hours passed, and the snow deepened, and there was neither sight nor sound of the boy. Garth was not sparing of his bitter self-reproaches then, for having abandoned him. It seemed to poor Garth in his hopelessness, as if his whole course through the country had been marked by a series of hideous blunders.

Less than three hours of daylight now remained to him, and he was all of ten miles from his own base. He dared not push farther away, for, little as he regarded himself, he could take no risks while Natalie's fate still hung in the balance. But before giving up, he determined to make one last sortie back and forth across the prairie. Far to the right, just as hope was expiring, he saw, crossing the white expanse, a crooked, double row of slight depressions, like little moulds, slowly filling with powdery snow.

Flinging himself off his horse, with a beating heart, he hastily scooped out the snow. A man's footprint was clearly revealed. With a shout, he mounted again and jerked his horse's head around. The weary animal balked flatly at facing the storm, but Garth, beside himself, lashed him until he plunged into it. The tracks momentarily grew plainer. While they had strayed far to the left of his own course, he wondered to see that they still held the right direction in the main.

He redoubled his shouting. At last a muffled, indistinguishable sound answered him from ahead; and presently out of the wild whirl of flakes, a spectral figure was slowly resolved--as poignant a symbol of humanity as the last man on earth.

"Charley! Charley!" shouted Garth.

The figure turned uncertainly. Under the snow-laden lashes the eyes were vague.

Garth slipped out of the saddle; and, throwing his arm about the boy's shoulders, caught him to his breast. "Thank God! I was in time!" he cried in a great voice.

"It's really you!" the boy murmured. "I thought I was hearing things."

Garth clapped him between the shoulders. "Buck up, my hearty!" he cried. "It's all right now!"