Part 33 (1/2)
”Are you afraid--of yourself?”
”No. Only men with something on their conscience are afraid.”
She looked at him queerly, then turned away. Houston again took the lead, rounding the stretches, then waiting for her, halting at the dangerous gulleys and guiding her safely across, but silently. He had said enough; more would require explanations. And there was a pack upon his back which contained a tiny form with tight-curled hands, with eyes that were closed,--a poor, nameless little thing he had sworn to carry to grace and to protection. At last they reached the cabins.
Houston untied the bond which connected them and loosened his snowshoes, that he might plunge into the smallest drift before a door and force his way within. There was no wood; he tore the clapboards from a near-by cabin and the tar paper from the wind-swept roof. Five minutes later a fire was booming; a girl tired, bent-shouldered, her eyes drooping from a sudden desire for sleep, huddled near it. Houston walked to the pack and took food.
”You would rather eat alone?”
”Yes.”
”I shall be in the next cabin--awake.”
”Awake?”
”Yes. I'd rather--keep watch.”
”But there is nothing--”
”Illness--a snowslide--a fresh drift. I would feel easier in mind.
Good night.”
Then with his snowshoes and his pack of death, he went out the door, to plunge through another drift, to force his way into a cabin, and there, a plodding, dumb figure, go soddenly about the duties of comfort. And more than once in the howling, bl.u.s.tery night which followed, Houston s.h.i.+vered, shook himself into action and rose to rebuild a fire that had died while he had sat hunched in the hard, uncomfortable chair beside it, trying to fathom what the day had meant, striving to hope for the keeping of the promises that an hysterical woman had made, struggling for the strength to go on,--on with this cheery, brave little bit of humanity in the next cabin, without a word in self-extenuation, without a hint to break the lack of estimation in which she held him, without a plea in his own defense. And some way, Houston felt that such a plea now would be cheap and tawdry; they were in a world where there were bigger things than human aims and human frailties. Besides, he had locked his lips at the command of a grief-ridden woman. To open them in self-extenuation would mean that she must be brought into it; for she had been the one who had clinched the points of suspicion in the mind of Medaine Robinette. Were he now to speak of proof that she had lied--
It was impossible. The wind-swept night became wind-swept dawn, to find him still huddled there, still thinking, still grim and drawn and haggard with sleeplessness and fatigue. Then he rose at a call from without:
”Are you ready?”
He affixed the pack. Together they went on again, graceless figures in frozen clothing, she pointing the way, he aiding her with his strength, in the final battle toward the summit of the range,--and Crestline.
Hours they plodded and climbed, climbed and plodded, the blood again dripping from his lips, her features again s.h.i.+elded by the heavy folds of the bandanna; the moisture of their breath at times swirling about them like angry steam, at others invisible in the areas of sudden dryness, where the atmosphere lapped up even the vapors of laboring lungs before it could visualize. Snow and cloud and rising walls of granite: this was their world, and they crawling pigmies within it.
Once she brushed against the pack on his back and drew away with a sudden recoil. Houston dully realized the reason. The selfish, gripping hands of Winter, holding nothing sacred, had invaded even there.
Noon. And a half-cry from both of them, a burst of energy which soon faded. For above was Crestline--even as the little Croatian settlement had been--smokeless, lifeless. They had gone from here also, hurrying humans fleeing with the last snowplow before the tempest, beings afraid to remain, once the lines of communication were broken. But there was nothing to do but go on.
Roofless houses met them, stacks of crumpled snow, where the beams had cracked beneath the weight of high piled drifts; staring, gla.s.sless windows and rooms filled with white; stoves that no longer fought the clasp of winter but huddled instead amid piles of snow; that was all.
Crestline had fled; there was no life, no sound, only the angry, wailing cry of the wind through half-frozen roof spouts, the slap of clattering boards, loosened by the storm. Gloomily Houston surveyed the desolate picture, at last to turn to the girl.
”I must go on. I gave my promise.”
She nodded.
”It means Tollifer now. The descent is more dangerous.”
”Do you know it?”
”Not as well as the other. If I only had something to guide me.”
And as if in answer, the storm lifted for a moment. Gradually the wind stilled, in one of those stretches of calm which seem to be only the breeding spots of more terror, more bitterness. But they gave no heed to that, nor to the red ball of the sun, faintly visible through the clouds. Far below, miles in reality, straight jets of steam rose high above black, curling smoke; faintly, distantly, whistles sounded. The snowplows!