Part 37 (1/2)

”To bring out the doctor.”

Allonby raised his head and looked at him curiously. ”Are you sure that, with six or eight feet of snow on the divide, you could ever get there?”

”Well,” said Brooke, cheerfully, ”I believe I could, and, if I don't, you will be very little worse off than you were before. You see, the provisions will not last two of us more than a few days longer, and you can take it that I will do all I can to get through the snow. Since you are not the only man who is anxious to find the silver, your health is a matter of importance to everybody just now.”

Allonby smiled curiously. ”We will consider that the reason, and it is a tolerably good one, or I would not let you go. Still, I fancy you have another, and it is appreciated. There is, however, something more to be said. You will find my working plans in the case yonder should anything unexpected happen before you come back. Life, you know, is always a trifle uncertain.”

”That,” said Brooke, decisively, ”is morbid nonsense. You will be down the mine again in a week after the doctor comes.”

”Well,” said Allonby, with a curious quietness, ”I should, at least, very much like to find the silver.”

Brooke changed the subject somewhat abruptly, and it was an hour later when he shook hands with his comrade and went out into the bitter night with two blankets strapped upon his shoulders. Their parting was not demonstrative, though they realized that the grim spectre with the scythe would stalk close behind each of them until they met again, and Brooke, turning on the threshold, saw Allonby following him with comprehending eyes. Then he suddenly pulled the door to, shutting out the lamplight and the alluring red glow of the stove, and swung forward, knee-deep in dusty snow, into the gloom of the pines. The silence of the great white land was overwhelming, and the frost struck through him.

It was late on the third night when he floundered into a little sleeping settlement, and leaned gasping against the door of the doctor's house before he endeavored to rouse its occupant. The latter stared at him almost aghast when he opened it, lamp in hand, and Brooke reeled, grey in the face with weariness and sheeted white with frozen snow, into the light.

”Steady!” he said, slipping his arm through Brooke's. ”Come in here.

Now, keep back from the stove. I'll get you something that will fix you up in a minute. You came in from the Dayspring--over the divide? I heard the freighter telling the boys it couldn't be done.”

Brooke laughed harshly. ”Well,” he said, ”you see me here, and, if that's not sufficient, you're going to prove the range can be crossed yourself to-morrow.”

The doctor was new to that country, and he was very young, or he would, in all probability, not been there at all, but when he heard Brooke's story he nodded tranquilly. ”I'm afraid I haven't done any mountaineering, but I had the long-distance snowshoe craze rather bad back in Montreal,” he said. ”You're not going to give me very much of a lead over the pa.s.ses, anyway, unless you sleep the next twelve hours.”

Brooke, as it happened, slept for six and then set out with the young doctor in blinding snow. He had forty to fifty pounds upon his back now, and once they left the sheltering timber it cost them four strenuous hours to make a thousand feet. Part of that night they lay awake, s.h.i.+vering in the pungent fir smoke in a hollow of the rocks, and started again, aching in every limb, long before the lingering dawn, while the next day pa.s.sed like a very unpleasant dream with the young doctor. The snow had ceased, and lay without cohesion, dusty and dry as flour, waist-deep where the bitter winds had whirled it in wreaths, while the glare of the white peaks became intolerable under the cloudless sun.

For hours they crawled through juniper scrub or stunted wisps of pines, where the trunks the winds had reaped lay piled upon each other in tangled confusion, with the sifting snow blown in to conceal the pitfalls between. By afternoon the doctor was flagging visibly, and white peaks and climbing timber reeled formlessly before his dazzled eyes as he struggled onward the rest of that day. Then, when the pitiless blue above them grew deeper in tint until the stars shone in depths of indigo, and the ranges fading from silver put on dim shades of blueness that enhanced their spotless purity, they stopped again, and made s.h.i.+ft to boil the battered kettle in a gully, down which there moaned a little breeze that seared every patch of unprotected skin. The doctor collapsed behind a boulder, and lay there limply while Brooke fed the fire.

”I'm 'most afraid you'll have to fix supper yourself to-night,” he said.

”Just now I don't quite know how I'm going to start to-morrow, though it will naturally have to be done.”

Brooke glanced round at the grim ramparts of ice and snow that cut sharp against the indigo. Night as it was, there was no softness in that scheme of color lighted by the frosty scintillations of the stars, and a s.h.i.+ver ran through his stiffened limbs.

”Yes,” he said. ”n.o.body not hardened to it could expect to stand more than another day in the open up here.”

He got the meal ready, but very little was said during it, and for a few hours afterwards the doctor lay coughing in the smoke of the fire, while his gum-boots softened and grew hard again as he drew his feet, which pained him intolerably between whiles, a trifle further from the crackling brands. He staggered when at last Brooke, finding that shaking was unavailing, dragged him upright.

”Breakfast's almost ready, and we have got to make the mine by to-night,” he said.

The doctor could never remember how they accomplished it, but his lips were split and crusted with coagulated blood, while there seemed to be no heat left in him, when Brooke stopped on a ridge of the hillside as dusk was closing in.

”The mine is close below us. In fact, we should have seen it from where we are,” he said.

Worn out as he was, the doctor noticed the grimness of his tone. ”The nearer the better,” he said. ”I don't quite know how I got here, but you scarcely seem at ease.”

”I was wondering why Allonby, who does not like the dark, has not lighted up yet,” Brooke said, drily. ”We will probably find out in a few more minutes.”

Then he went reeling down the descending trail, and did not stop again until he stood amidst the piles of debris and pine stumps, with the shanty looming dimly in front of him across the little clearing. It seemed very dark and still, and the doctor, who came up gasping, stopped abruptly when his comrade's shout died away. The silence that closed in again seemed curiously eerie.

”He must have heard you at that distance,” he said.