CHAPTER XXXIII
GAMBLING WITH DEATH
Beyond giving his horse a safe headway from the shelter, de Spain madelittle effort to guide her. He had chosen the Lady, not because shewas fresher, for she was not, but because he believed she possessed ofthe three horses the clearest instinct to bring her through the fightfor the lives that were at stake. He did not deceive himself with theidea he could do anything to help the beast find a way to succor; thatinstinct rested wholly in the Lady's head, not in his. He only knewthat if she could not get back to help, he could not. His own part inthe effort was quite outside any aid to the Lady--it was no more thanto reach alive whatever aid she could find, that he might direct it towhere Nan and her companion would endure a few hours longer the furyof the storm.
His own struggle for life, he realized, was with the wind--the roaringwind that hurled its broadsides of frozen snow in monstrous wavesacross the maddened sky, challenging every living thing. It drove icyknives into his face and ears, paralyzed in its swift grasp hismuscles and sinews, fought the stout flow of blood through his veins,and searched his very heart to still it.
Encouraging the Lady with kind words, and caressing her in her gropingefforts as she turned head and tail from the blinding sheets of snowand ice, de Spain let her drift, hoping she might bring them through,what he confessed in his heart to be, the narrowest of chances.
He bent low in his saddle under the unending blasts. He buffeted hislegs and arms to fight off the fatal cold. He slipped more than oncefrom his seat, and with a hand on the pommel tramped beside the horseto revive his failing circulation; there would come a time, herealized, when he could no longer climb up again, but he staved thatissue off to the last possible moment of endurance, because the Ladymade better time when he was on her back. When the struggle to remounthad been repeated until nature could no longer by any staggeringeffort be made to respond to his will, until his legs were no longer apart of his benumbed being--until below his hips he had no bodyanswerable to his commands, but only two insensible masses of leadthat anchored him to the ground--he still forced the frozen feet tocarry him, in a feeble, monstrous gait beside the Lady, while hedragged with his hands on the saddle for her patient aid.
One by one every thought, as if congealed in their brain cells,deserted his mind--save the thought that he must not freeze to death.More than once he had hoped the insensate fury of the blizzard mightabate. The Lady had long since ceased to try to face it--like astripped vessel before a hurricane, she was drifting under it. DeSpain realized that his helpless legs would not carry him farther. Hishands, freezing to the pommel, no longer supported him. They finallyslipped from it and he fell prostrate in the snow beside his horse.When he would cry out to her his frozen lips could mumble no words. Itwas the fight no longer of a man against nature, but only of anindomitable soul against a cruel, hateful death. He struggled to hisfeet only to fall again more heavily. He pulled himself up this timeby the stirrup-strap, got his hands and arms up to the pommel, andclung to it for a few paces more. But he fell at last, and could nolonger rise from the ground. The storm swept unceasingly on.
The Lady, checked by the lines wrapped on his arm, stopped. De Spainlay a moment, then backed her up a step, pulled her head down by thebridle, clasped his wooden arms around her neck, spoke to her and,lifting her head, the mare dragged him to his feet. Clumsily andhelplessly he loosened the tugs and the whiffletree, beat his handstogether with idiotic effort, hooked the middle point of thewhiffletree into the elbow of his left arm, brought the forearm andhand up flat against his shoulder, and with the hitching-strap lashedhis forearm and upper arm tightly together around the whiffletree.
He drew the tugs stiffly over the Lady's back, unloosed the cinches ofthe saddle, pushed it off the horse and, sinking into the snow behindher, struck with his free arm at her feet. Relieved of the saddle, theLady once more started, dragging slowly behind her through the snow astill breathing human being. Less than an hour before it had been aman. It was hardly more now, as the Lady plodded on, than an insensatelog. But not even death could part it again from the horse to which deSpain, alive, had fastened it.
The fearful pain from the tortured arm, torn at times almost from itssocket, the gradual snapping of straining ligaments, the constantrupture of capillaries and veins sustained his consciousness for awhile. Then the torturing pain abated, the rough dragging shatteredthe bruised body less. It was as if the Lady and the storm togetherwere making easier for the slowly dying man his last trail across thedesert. He still struggled to keep alive, by sheer will-power,flickering sparks of consciousness, and to do so concentrated everythought on Nan. It was a poignant happiness to summon her picture tohis fainting senses; he knew he should hold to life as long as hecould think of her. Love, stronger than death, welled in his heart.The bitter cold and the merciless wind were kinder as he called herimage from out of the storm. She seemed to speak--to lift him in herarms. Ahead, distant mountains rose, white-peaked. The sun shone. Herode with her through green fields, and a great peace rested on hisweary senses.
* * * * *
Lady Jane, pushing on and on, enlightened by that instinct beforewhich the reason of man is weak and pitiful, seeing, as it were,through the impenetrable curtain of the storm where refuge lay,herself a slow-moving crust of frozen snow, dragged to her journey'send--to the tight-shut doors of the Calabasas barn--her unconsciousburden, and stood before them patiently waiting until some one shouldopen for her. It was one of the heartbreaks of a tragic day that noone ever knew just when the Lady reached the door or how long she andher unconscious master waited in the storm for admission. A startledexclamation from John Lefever, who had periodically and anxiouslyleft the red-hot stove in the office to walk moodily to the window,brought the men tumbling over one another as he ran from hiscompanions to throw open the outer door and pull the drooping horseinto the barn.
It was the Indian, Scott, who, reading first of all the men everythingin the dread story, sprang forward with a stifled exclamation, as thehorse dragged in the snow-covered log, whipped a knife from hispocket, cut the incumbered arm and white hand free from thewhiffletree and, carrying the stiffened body into the office, beganwith insane haste to cut away the clothing.
Lefever, perceiving it was de Spain thus drawn to their feet, shouted,while he tore from the blade of Scott's knife the frozen garments, theorders for the snow, the heated water, the warm blankets, the alcoholand brandy, and, stripped to his waist, chafed the marble feet. TheIndian, better than a staff of doctors, used the cunning of a sorcererto revive the spark of inanimate life not yet extinguished by thestorm. A fearful interval of suspense followed the silence into whichthe work settled, a silence broken only by the footsteps of menrunning to and from the couch over which Scott, Lefever, and McAlpin,half-naked, worked in mad concert.
De Spain opened his eyes to wander from one to the other of the faces.He half rose up, struggling in a frenzy with the hands that restrainedhim. While his companions pleaded to quiet him, he fought them until,restored to its seat of reason, his mind reasserted itself and, lyingexhausted, he told them in his exquisite torture of whom he had left,and what must be done to find and bring them in.
While the relief wagons, equipped with straining teams and flanked byveteran horsemen, were dashing out of the barn, he lapsed intounconsciousness. But he had been able to hold Scott's hand long enoughto tell him he must find Nan and bring her in, or never come back.
It was Scott who found her. In their gropings through the blizzard thethree had wandered nearer Calabasas than any one of them dreamed. Andon the open desert, far south and east of the upper lava beds, it wasScott's horse that put a foot through the bottom of the overturnedwagon box. The suspected mound of snow, with the buried horsesscrambling to their feet, rose upright at the crash. Duke crouched,half-conscious, under the rude shelter. Lying where he had placed her,snugly between the horses, Scott found Nan. He spoke to her when sheopened her staring eye
s, picked her up in his arms, called to hiscompanions for the covered wagon, and began to restore her, without amoment of delay, to life. He even promised if she would drink thehateful draft he put to her lips and let him cut away her shoes andleggings and the big coat frozen on her, that in less than an hour sheshould see Henry de Spain alive and well.
Nan of Music Mountain Page 34