But the hours pa.s.sed, 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 m.u.f.fled, 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 G.o.d! 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!"

"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 G.o.d 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 coulee 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 coulee; 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 compa.s.s again for Rina's camp.

It grew colder hourly; and the snowflakes became as hard and sharp as grains of coa.r.s.e 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 coulees, it became totally dark; and he could no longer read the face of his compa.s.s. 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 pa.s.sage 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 coulee; 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 compa.s.s. 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 coulee, 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 gra.s.s, and packed his blankets and a supply of food, including what was left of the little carca.s.s 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 enc.u.mbering 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 coulee 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 pa.s.sed. He determined to search up and down before pushing ahead.

Sure enough, no more than two hundred yards down-stream he began to come upon the tracks of horses and saw the bare patches they had pawed to reach the gra.s.s; and a little farther he ran plump upon the fresh remains of the camp; two bare spots where tents had been pitched, the ashes of a fire, and innumerable tracks of men and horses--the whole startlingly conspicuous in the sweep of unbroken snow.

Garth's heart swelled with rage and mortification to think what a little distance had separated them during the night; and how by rising only three hours earlier, he might perhaps have caught them. But presently cooler counsels came to his aid; and when he considered the well-beaten track that led over the hill beyond, he was thankful for so much luck.

He knew that at least until more snow should fall, they could never shake him off again; and he rode after with a renewed courage. His horse, too, freed of the entangling drifts, and sensing the other horses ahead, seemed to overcome his weakness for a while; and loped over the beaten trail with a good will.

Beyond this coulee the character of the country began to change.

Crossing a height, Garth saw a range of gleaming mountains off to the west at no great distance; his course was heading him obliquely into the foothills. The prairie gradually broke up; the mounds became hills; and the hollows deepened into valleys. With every mile, almost, the hills became higher and more conical; outcroppings of rock began to appear; and the little streams ran in gorges now, instead of coulees.

In the rougher country the horse's access of courage soon failed. His wind was gone, he sobbed for breath; and Garth was presently reduced to the necessity of leading him up every incline. On a wide flat between two ranges, he mounted after a long walk, and urged him into a run over this easy piece. The slack-twisted animal was not equal to the effort; halfway across, his heart broke; and he collapsed in a heap, ploughing up the snow, and flinging his rider over his head. When Garth returned to him, he was stone dead. In the midst of his chagrin the man could spare a glance of pity for the s.h.a.ggy, misshapen beast. One of the vulgar equine tribe, at his best neither beautiful nor courageous, he had nevertheless given his life to the journey.

Beside the stony watercourse that traversed this little plain, he made a cache of saddle, bridle and what food he could not carry on his back.

Over the spot he piled a cairn of stones to mark it, and protect the little store from marauding animals. In addition to blankets, rifle and ammunition, he carried with him food sufficient for about five days. In an hour he was on his way again.

During the rest of the day, and the following day, the character of the country changed only in degree. The trail never carried him directly into the mountains, but skirted among the foothills, which raised strange, abrupt, detached cones on either hand--steep, naked, unreasonable shapes of earth, like nightmare forms. Each day Garth plodded to the limit of his strength, reckless of what lay before him, regarding only the beaten trail which led the way. From various signs it was clear those ahead ever gained on him; but he kept himself up with the thought that they must sooner or later make an extended stop to recuperate their horses. Each night he made his tea with snow-water; and, rolling up in his blankets beside the fire, slept under the stars; and at dawn he was astir again. Hard work was his beneficent sedative.

On the second night as he lay down he heard, or fancied he heard in the stillness, the breath of a far-off, heavy sound. He ascribed it to the roar of the great falls Rina had told him of; and the thought lent new vigour to his limbs next morning. He had another reason to hurry his steps; for each day had waxed a little warmer; and to-day the snow melted fast, threatening at last to obliterate the track he followed.