Part 63

"Have you got Natalie?" the boy said quickly.

Garth sadly shook his head.

"You shouldn't have come back then," he said dully. "I didn't expect it!"

Garth hugged him anew. "Dear lad!" he cried with a break in his voice. "I couldn't let you die in the snow!"

The kindness brought fuller consciousness back to the boy's eyes. He clung to Garth then; and lowered his head; and whimpered a little. After all he was only seventeen.

Garth hoisted him to the saddle; and headed into the storm again. The horse balked continually, sorely trying his patience. Their progress was very slow. Garth sought to keep Charley up with cheerful speech.

"Bully for you to keep going!" he cried.

"It was because--Natalie might need me," the boy's voice trailed.

"And right on the course!" Garth sang. "How did you keep it?"

"When the snow hid your tracks--I remembered--to keep the wind on my right cheek," he murmured.

That was the last Garth could get out of him. He was presently alarmed to find the boy growing increasingly numb and drowsy; even he knew what this portended in the North. He pulled him out of the saddle; and made him walk; supporting him with one arm, while with the other he led the horse. The animal took advantage of his partial helplessness, to plant his legs and pull back anew. If there was ever an excuse for anger against a dumb beast, surely hard-pressed Garth had it then. The horse was crazed with exhaustion, and terror of the storm; and tugs and kicks were of no avail. Garth could not bring in both boy and horse by main strength; and in the end, with hearty curses, he was obliged to abandon the beast to his fate.

Garth, pulling his hat over his eyes, and drawing the boy's arm across his shoulders, doggedly pushed into the storm. He thus half supported, half dragged his companion, who was, nevertheless, compelled to use his own legs. Charley never spoke except now and then to beg drowsily to be let alone. In Garth's flask was about a gill of precious stimulant, and, when the boy's legs failed him, he doled it out in sips.

They had at least nine miles to cover--and only two hours of daylight left. Try as he would to banish it, the sense of nine miles' distance would roll itself interminably out before Garth's mind's eye. Nine miles into two hours--the sum had no answer. Afterward night and storm on the empty prairie--what was the use? But when he reached this point, he would grit his teeth and take a fresh hold of the boy. If he had any other defined thought besides this painful round, it was to thank God that he was strong; he needed every ounce of it now.

Instead of attempting to pick up his own trail--surely obscured by now in the snow--he shaped his course northwest, trusting to strike the coulée at its nearest point, and travel down until he hit the mark he had set up. It was a little longer so; but the result justified it, for there was some shelter in the coulée; and working down the bottom, they could not miss the mark.

It was half-past four by Garth's watch when they laboriously climbed up the other side; and set their course by compass again for Rina's camp. It grew colder hourly; and the snowflakes became as hard and sharp as grains of coarse powder. Charley was kept going automatically by frequent small doses of the spirit from the flask. Garth dared not spare any of it for himself. It soon began to grow dark; and long before Garth could hope they had nearly covered the distance between the two coulées, it became totally dark; and he could no longer read the face of his compass. Fortunately the wind held steady from the north; he struggled ahead, keeping it on his right cheek as Charley had done before him.

Garth's head became confused; he was no longer sensible of the passage of time. Only his will kept his legs at their work. Drowsiness crept over him; and with it a growing sense of the uselessness of struggling further. He fought it for a while, but with subsiding energy. His knees began to weaken under him; he sank down. With a desperate effort, he struggled up again; and won another painful hundred yards. He was falling again--and this time he did not care--when suddenly the ground fell away from under his feet, he pitched forward, and he and the boy rolled down a steep declivity together.

Garth instantly knew they had reached the second coulée; and the thought cleared his fogged senses like the draught from his flask which he could not spare himself. He poured the last drops between Charley's numb lips; and turned to the right over the stony bed of the watercourse. He remembered Charley had strayed far to the left of his true course when guiding himself by the wind; and he had also observed in himself a tendency to swerve to that side, when working by compass. So he was sure they were somewhere above the poplar bluff--how far he dared not guess.

He was right. Utterly worn out by a seeming interminable struggle through the drifts in the bottom of the coulée, at last a misty, pinkish aura blushed in the snowy night. It was Rina's fire--warmth and shelter! and before it a little animal was roasting on a spit. Garth's senses slipped away in rapture at the smell it sent forth.

XXIII

THE SOLITARY PURSUER

Sometime during the course of the night the snow ceased to fall; and morning broke clear and cold. Garth had turned in, intending to rise at four; but Nature exacted her due, and it was seven before he awoke. The sky was a bowl of palest, fleckless azure; the sun shone gloriously on the field of snow; and the air stung the nostrils like the heady fumes of wine. But he was in no temper to take any delight in morning beauties; he ached in every bone and muscle as if he had been beaten with a club; and at the sight of the mounting sun, he bitterly reproached himself--and Rina, for the lost hours.

As for Charley, a glance at the boy showed that he was quite incapable of further travelling for the present. He suffered as much from the blow on the head as from the exposure in the snow. His mind was hopelessly confused and wandering. In any case they had but a single horse left; and only the one course of action was open to Garth. He instructed Rina to remain where she was and care for the boy, while he pushed ahead.

Even Rina betrayed some surprise. "What you do?" she said. "Three men to shoot, and Mary to watch her. You got no chance!"

"I'll find a way!" he said desperately. "This Death River, tell me about it!"

Rina pointed northwest. "Big river, moch water," she said. "Come from mountains. Ver' moch high falls; mak' lak thunder! Above falls, ver' rough rapids, no can cross. Below falls, deep black hole; breeds say bad spirits go there. Only one place to cross, half-mile below falls."

Garth caught the horse, who had fed himself as best he could by pawing the snow off the grass, and packed his blankets and a supply of food, including what was left of the little carcass Rina roasted. He learned it was a lynx; but the flesh was sweet, and he was too thankful for fresh meat to quarrel with the nature of it. He left Rina and Charley with a better will, knowing she could doubtless get others, as she had snared the first.

There was about ten inches of snow on the flat, with deep encumbering drifts in the hollows; and his advance was very slow. The ill-nourished horse wearied immediately; and any pace beyond a walk was out of the question. Had Garth only possessed snow-shoes he could have made much better time on foot. The vast expanse was as empty as a clean sheet of paper; nevertheless, he saw the prairie was not without its busy population, as evidenced by the number of tracks of little furry paws that had crossed his course already since the snow finished falling.

At noon, having made about eleven miles (he figured), he came to the brink of a coulée wider and deeper than any they had crossed hitherto; and which contained a stream in the bottom, running blackly around snow-capped stones. As he refreshed himself, and allowed his horse to drink, he reflected that Grylls would have reached this stream the day before about the time the snow commenced; and that it was likely the outfit had camped on its bank until the storm passed. He determined to search up and down before pushing ahead.