That the pursuer was Leroux there could be no possible doubt. He had evidently passed the sleigh, and was undoubtedly pressing forward, elated and confident of our capture. But he must still be at least a dozen miles away.

He could not reach us that night and he could hardly travel by night.

We should have a half day's start of him in the morning.

I gripped my pistols as we strode along.

We went on and on. The afternoon was wearing away; the sun was very low now and all its strength had gone. The wolf followed us, howling from afar. Once I saw it across the treeless wastes--a gaunt, white, dog-like figure, trotting against the steely grey of the sky.

We ascended the last of the foot-hills before the trail dipped toward the valley, which was guarded by two sentinel mountains of that jagged ridge before us. From the top I looked back. Simon was nowhere to be seen.

"Courage, Jacqueline," I said, patting her arm, "The huts ought to be here."

Her courage was greater than my own. She looked up and smiled at me.

And so we descended and went on and on, and the sun dipped below the edge of the world.

The wolf crept nearer, and its howls rang out with piercing strokes across the silence. My eyes ached so that I could hardly discern the darkening land, and the snow came down, not steadily, but in swirling eddies blown on fierce gusts of wind.

And suddenly raising my eyes despairingly, I saw the huts. They stood about four hundred yards away from where the trail ran through the mountains.

There were five of them, and they had not been occupied for at least two seasons, for the blackened timbers were falling apart, and the roofs had been torn off all but one of them, no doubt for fuel. The wind was whirling the snow wildly around them, and it whistled through the broken, rotting walls.

I flung my pack inside the roofed one, and began tearing apart the timbers of another to make a fire.

Jacqueline stood looking at me in docile faith.

"I can go on," she said quietly. "I can go on, Paul."

I caught her hands in mine. "We shall stay here, Jacqueline," I said.

She did not answer me, but, opening the pack, began the preparation of our meal, which consisted of some biscuits left from the night before, when we had made a quantity on the wood ashes. We made tea over the roaring flames, and sat listening to the wolf's call and the wind that drove our fire in gusts of smoke and flame.

The wind grew fiercer. It was a hurricane. It drowned the wolf's call; it almost silenced the sound of our own voices. Thank God that we had at least our shelter in that storm.

I scooped out a bed for Jacqueline inside the snow-filled hut and spread it with the big sleigh robe. She lay down in her fur coat, and I wrapped the ends around her. I looked into her sweet face and marvelled at its serenity. Her eyes closed wearily.

But, though I was as tired as she, I could not sleep. I crouched over the fire, pondering over the morrow's acts.

Should I wait for Leroux and shoot him down like a dog if he molested us? Or should we hide among the hills and watch him pass by? But that would avail us nothing. If we went on we must encounter him, and the sooner the better.

This problem and a fiercer one filled my mind, for my soul was as storm-beset as the hut, whose planking shook under the gale's force. I realized how incongruous my position was.

I had no status at all. I was accompanying a run-away wife back to her father's home, perhaps to meet her husband there. And whether Leroux held me in his present power or not, inexorably I was heading for his own objective.

CHAPTER X

SNOW BLINDNESS

More madly now than ever I felt that fierce temptation. There she lay, the one woman who had ever seriously come into my life, sleeping so near to me that I could bend down and rest my hand on the inert form over which the snow drifted so steadily.

I brushed it away. I brooded over her. Why had I ever brought her on that journey? Would that I had kept her, with all her love and gentleness, for my delight.

If I had taken her to Jamaica, where I had planned to go, instead of engaging that mock-heroic odyssey--there, among palm trees, in an eternal spring, there would have been no need that she should remember.

I looked down on her. Again the snow covered her.

It fell so inexorably. It was like Leroux. It was as tireless as he, and as implacable as he. I brushed it away with frantic haste, and still it drifted into the doorless hut.

A dreadful fear held me in its grip: what if she never awoke? Some people died thus in the snow. I raised the sleigh robe, and saw that the fur coat stirred softly as she breathed.

How gently she slept--as gently as she lived. How could her own have abandoned her in her need?

At last, out of the wild passions that fought within me, decision was born. I would go on, because she had bidden me. And I would be ready for Leroux, and let him act as he saw fit. I loaded my pistols. I could do no more than fight for Jacqueline, and with God be the issue.

And with that determination I grew calm. And I sat over the fire and let my imagination stray toward some future when our troubles would be in the past and we should be together.

"Paul!"

I must have been half asleep, for I came back to myself with a start and sprang to my feet. Jacqueline had risen upon her knees; she flung her arms out wildly, and suddenly she caught her breath and screamed, and stood up, and ran uncertainly toward me, with hands that groped for me.

She found me; I caught her, and she pushed me from her and shuddered and stared at me in that uncertain doubt that follows dreams.

"I am here, Jacqueline," I said. "With you--always, till you send me away. Remember that even in dreams, Jacqueline."

She knew me now, and she was recoiling from me, out through the hut door, into the blinding snow. I sprang after her.

"Jacqueline! It is I--Paul! It is Paul! Jacqueline!"

She was running from me and screaming in the snow. I heard her moccasins breaking through the thin ice crust. And, mad with terror, I rushed after her.

"Jacqueline! It is Paul!" I cried.

And as I emerged from the hut's shelter a red-hot glare from the east seemed to sear and kill my vision. It was the rising sun. I had thought it night, and it was already day. And I could see nothing through my swollen eyelids except the white light of the shining snow.

The wind howled round me, and though the sun shone, the snowflakes stung my face like hail.

I did not know under the influence of what dread dream she was. But I ran wildly to and fro, calling her, and now and again I heard the sound of her little moccasins as she plunged through the knee-high snow.

Sometimes I seemed to be so near that I could almost touch her hand, and once I heard her panting breath behind me; but I never caught her.

And never once did she answer me.

"What is it? What is it?" I pleaded madly. "Jacqueline, don't you know me? Don't you remember me?"

The sound of the moccasins far away, and then the whine of the wind again. I did not know where the huts were now. I could see nothing but a yellow glare. And fear of Leroux came on me and turned my heart to water. I stood still, listening, like a hunted stag. There came no sound.

It was horrible, in that wild waste, alone. I tried to gather my scattered senses together.

Eastward, I know, the river lay, and that blinding brightness came from the east. Southward a little distance, was the hill that we had last ascended on the evening before. I could discern the merest outlines of the land, but I fancied that I could see that it sloped upward toward the south.