by Unknown
She looked back at the horses laboring up the hill. Swiftwater had got down and was urging them forward, his long whip crackling about the ears of the leaders. He waddled as he walked. His fat legs were too short for the round barrel body. A big roll of fat bulged out over the collar of his shirt. Whenever he was excited--and he always was on the least excuse--he puffed and snorted and grew alarmingly purple.
"Fat chance," he exploded as soon as he got within hearing. "Snow in those clouds--tons of it. H'm! And wind. Wow! We're in for an honest-to-God blizzard, sure as you're a foot high."
Swiftwater was worried. He would have liked to turn and run for it. But the last roadhouse was twenty-seven miles back. If the blizzard came howling down the slope they would have a sweet time of it reaching safety. Smith's Crossing was on the other side of the divide, only nine miles away. They would have to worry through somehow. Probably those angry clouds were half a bluff.
The temperature was dropping rapidly. Already snow fell fast in big thick flakes. To make it worse, the wind was beginning to rise. It came in shrill gusts momentarily increasing in force.
The stage-driver knew the signs of old and cursed the luck that had led him to bring the stage. It was to have been the last trip with horses until spring. His dogs were waiting for him at Katma for the return journey. He did not blame himself, for there was no reason to expect such a storm so early in the season. None the less, it was too bad that his lead dog had been ailing when he left the gold camp eight days before.
Miss O'Neill knew that Swiftwater Pete was anxious, and though she was not yet afraid, the girl understood the reason for it. The road ran through the heart of a vast snow-field, the surface of which was being swept by a screaming wind. The air was full of sifted white dust, and the road furrow was rapidly filling. Soon it would be obliterated. Already the horses were panting and struggling as they ploughed forward. Sheba tramped behind the stage-driver and in her tracks walked Mrs. Olson, the other passenger.
Through the muffled scream of the storm Swiftwater shouted back to Sheba. "You wanta keep close to me."
She nodded her head. His order needed no explanation. The world was narrowing to a lane whose walls she could almost touch with her fingers. A pall of white wrapped them. Upon them beat a wind of stinging sleet. Nothing could be seen but the blurred outlines of the stage and the driver's figure.
The bitter cold searched through Sheba's furs to her soft flesh and the blast of powdered ice beat upon her face. The snow was getting deeper as the road filled. Once or twice she stumbled and fell. Her strength ebbed, and the hinges of her knees gave unexpectedly beneath her. How long was it, she asked herself, that Macdonald had said men could live in a blizzard?
Staggering blindly forward, Sheba bumped into the driver. He had drawn up to give the horses a moment's rest before sending them plunging at the snow again.
"No chance," he called into the young woman's ear. "Never make Smith's in the world. Goin' try for miner's cabin up gulch little way."
The team stuck in the drifts, fought through, and was blocked again ten yards beyond. A dozen times the horses gave up, answered the sting of the whip by diving head first at the white banks, and were stopped by fresh snow-combs.
Pete gave up the fight. He began unhitching the horses, while Sheba and Mrs. Olson, clinging to each other's hands, stumbled forward to join him. The words he shouted across the back of a horse were almost lost in the roar of the shrieking wind.
"... heluvatime ... ride ... gulch," Sheba made out.
He flung Mrs. Olson astride one of the wheelers and helped Sheba to the back of the right leader. Swiftwater clambered upon its mate himself.
The girl paid no attention to where they were going. The urge of life was so faint within her that she did not greatly care whether she lived or died. Her face was blue from the cold; her vitality was sapped. She seemed to herself to have turned to ice below the hips. Outside the misery of the moment her whole attention was concentrated on sticking to the back of the horse. Numb though her fingers were, she must keep them fastened tightly in the frozen mane of the animal. She recited her lesson to herself like a child. She must stick on--she must--she must.
Whether she lost consciousness or not Sheba never knew. The next she realized was that Swiftwater Pete was pulling her from the horse. He dragged her into a cabin where Mrs. Olson lay crouched on the floor.
"Got to stable the horses," he explained, and left them.
After a time he came back and lit a fire in the sheet-iron stove. As the circulation that meant life flooded back into her chilled veins Sheba endured a half-hour of excruciating pain. She had to clench her teeth to keep back the groans that came from her throat, to walk the floor and nurse her tortured hands with fingers in like plight.
The cabin was empty of furniture except for a home-made table, rough stools, and the frame of a bed. The last occupant had left a little firewood beside the stove, enough to last perhaps for twenty-four hours. Sheba did not need to be told that if the blizzard lasted long enough, they would starve to death. In the handbag left in the stage were a box of candy and an Irish plum pudding. She had brought the latter from the old country with her and was taking it and the chocolates to the Husted children. But just now the stage was as far from them as Drogheda.
Like many rough frontiersmen, Swiftwater Pete was a diamond in the raw. He had the kindly, gentle instincts that go to the making of a good man. So far as could be he made a hopeless and impossible situation comfortable. His judgment told him that they were caught in a trap from which there was no escape, but for the sake of the women he put a cheerful face on things.
"Lucky we found this cabin," he growled amiably. "By this time we'd 'a' been up Salt Creek if we hadn't. Seeing as our luck has stood up so far, I reckon we'll be all right. Mighty kind of Mr. Last Tenant to leave us this firewood. Comes to a showdown we've got one table, four stools, and a bed that will make first-class fuel. We ain't so worse off."
"If we only had some food," Mrs. Olson suggested.
"Food!" Pete looked at her in assumed surprise. "Huh! What about all that live stock I got in the stable? I've heard tell, ma'am, that broncho tenderloin is a favorite dish with them there French chiefs that do the cooking. They kinder trim it up so's it's 'most as good as frawgs' legs."
Sheba had never before slept on bare boards with a sealskin coat for a sleeping-bag. But she was very tired and dropped off almost instantly. Twice she woke during the night, disturbed by the stiffness and the pain of her body. It seemed to her that the hard, whipsawed planks were pushing through the soft flesh to the bones. She was cold, too, and crept closer to the stout Swedish woman lying beside her. Presently she fell asleep again to the sound of the blizzard howling outside. When she wakened for the third time it was morning.
In the afternoon the blizzard died away. As far as she could see, Sheba looked out upon a waste of snow. Her eyes turned from the desolation without to the bare and cheerless room in which they had found shelter. In spite of herself a little shiver ran down the spine of the girl. Had she come into this Arctic solitude to find her tomb?
Resolutely she brushed the gloomy thought from her mind and began to chat with Mrs. Olson. In a corner of the cabin Sheba had found a torn and disreputable copy of "Vanity Fair." The covers and the first forty pages were gone. A splash of what appeared to be tobacco juice defiled the last sheet. But the fortunes of Becky and Amelia had served to make her forget during the morning that she was hungry and likely to be much hungrier before another day had passed.
As soon as the storm had moderated enough to let him go out with safety, Swiftwater Pete had taken one of the horses for an attempt at trail-breaking.
"Me, I'm after that plum pudding. I gotta get a feed of oats from the stage for my bronchs too. The scenery here is sure fine, but it ain't what you would call nourishing. Huh! Watch our smoke when me and old Baldface git to bucking them drifts."
He had been gone two hours and the early dusk was alre
ady descending over the white waste when Sheba ventured out to see what had become of the stage-driver. But the cold was so bitter that she soon gave up the attempt to fight her way through the drifts and turned back to the cabin.
Sometime later Swiftwater Pete came stumbling into their temporary home. He was fagged to exhaustion but triumphant. Upon the table he dropped from the crook of his numbed arm two packages.
"The makings for a Christmas dinner," he said with a grin.
After he had taken off his mukluks and his frozen socks they wrapped him in their furs while he toasted before the stove. Mrs. Olson thawed out the pudding and the chocolates in the oven and made a kind of mush out of some oats Pete had saved from the horse feed. They ate their one-sided meal in high spirits. The freeze had saved their lives. If it held clear till to-morrow they could reach Smith's Crossing on the crust of the snow.
Swiftwater broke up the chairs for fuel and demolished the legs of the table, after which he lay down before the stove and fell at once into a sodden sleep.
Presently Mrs. Olson lay down on the bed and began to snore regularly. Sheba could not sleep. The boards tired her bones and she was cold. Sometimes she slipped into cat naps that were full of bad dreams. She thought she was walking on the snow-comb of a precipice and that Colby Macdonald pushed her from her precarious footing and laughed at her as she slid swiftly toward the gulf below. When she wakened with a start it was to find that the fire had died down. She was shivering from lack of cover. Quietly the girl replenished the fire and lay down again.
When she wakened with a start it was morning. A faint light sifted through the single window of the shack. Sheba whispered to the older woman that she was going out for a little walk.
"Be careful, dearie," advised Mrs. Olson. "I wouldn't try to go too far."
Sheba smiled to herself at the warning. It was not likely that she would go far enough to get lost with all these millions of tons of snow piled up around her in every direction.
She had come out because she was restless and was tired of the dingy and uncomfortable room. Without any definite intentions, she naturally followed the trail that Swiftwater had broken the day before. No wind stirred and the sky was clear. But it was very cold. The sun would not be up for half an hour.
As she worked her way down the gulch Sheba wondered whether the news of their loss had reached Kusiak. Were search parties out already to rescue them? Colby Macdonald had gone out into the blizzard years ago to save her father. Perhaps he might have been out all night trying to save her father's daughter. Peter would go, of course,--and Gordon Elliot. The work in the mines would stop and men would volunteer by scores. That was one fine thing about the North. It responded to the unwritten law that a man must risk his own life to save others.
But if the wires had come down in the storm Kusiak would not know they had not got through to Smith's Crossing. Swiftwater Pete spoke cheerfully about mushing to the roadhouse. But Sheba knew the snow would not bear the horses. They would have to walk, and it was not at all certain that Mrs. Olson could do so long a walk with the thermometer at forty or fifty below zero.
From a little knoll Sheba looked down upon the top of the stage three hundred yards below her, and while she stood there the promise of the new day was blazoned on the sky. It came with amazing beauty of green and primrose and amethyst, while the stars flickered out and the heavens took on the blue of sunrise. In a crotch between two peaks a faint golden glow heralded the sun. A circle of lovely rose-pink flushed the horizon.
Sheba had this much of the poet in her, that every sunrise was still a miracle. She drew a deep, slow breath of adoration and turned away. As she did so her eyes dilated and her body grew rigid.
Across the snow waste a man was coming. He was moving toward the cabin and must cross the trench close to her. The heart of the girl stopped, then beat wildly to make up the lost stroke. He had come through the blizzard to save her.
At that very instant, as if the stage had been set for it, the wonderful Alaska sun pushed up into the crotch of the peaks and poured its radiance over the Arctic waste. The pink glow swept in a tide of delicate color over the snow and transmuted it to millions of sparkling diamonds. The Great Magician's wand had recreated the world instantaneously.
CHAPTER XXVI
HARD MUSHING
Elliot and Holt left Kusiak in a spume of whirling, blinding snow. They traveled light, not more than forty pounds to the dog, for they wanted to make speed. It was not cold for Alaska. They packed their fur coats on the sled and wore waterproof parkas. On their hands were mittens of moosehide with duffel lining, on their feet mukluks above "German" socks. Holt had been a sour-dough miner too long to let his partner perspire from overmuch clothing. He knew the danger of pneumonia from a sudden cooling of the heat of the body.
Old Gideon took seven of his dogs, driving them two abreast. Six were huskies, rangy, muscular animals with thick, dense coats. They were in the best of spirits and carried their tails erect like their Malemute leader. Butch, though a Malemute, had a strong strain of collie in him. It gave him a sense of responsibility. His business was to see that the team kept strung out on the trail, and Butch was a past-master in the matter of discipline. His weight was ninety-three fighting pounds, and he could thrash in short order any dog in the team.
The snow was wet and soft. It clung to everything it touched. The dogs carried pounds of it in the tufts of hair that rose from their backs. An icy pyramid had to be knocked from the sled every half-hour. The snowshoes were heavy with white slush. Densely laden spruce boughs brushed the faces of the men and showered them with unexpected little avalanches.
They took turns in going ahead of the team and breaking trail. It was heavy, muscle-grinding work. Before noon they were both utterly fatigued. They dragged forward through the slush, lifting their laden feet sluggishly. They must keep going, and they did, but it seemed to them that every step must be the last.
Shortly after noon the storm wore itself out. The temperature had been steadily falling and now it took a rapid drop. They were passing through timber, and on a little slope they built with a good deal of difficulty a fire. By careful nursing they soon had a great bonfire going, in front of which they put their wet socks, mukluks, scarfs, and parkas to dry. The toes of the dogs had become packed with little ice balls. Gordon and Holt had to go carefully over the feet of each animal to dig these out.
The old-timer thawed out a slab of dried salmon till the fat began to frizzle and fed each husky a pound of the fish and a lump of tallow. He and Gordon made a pot of tea and ate some meat sandwiches they had brought with them to save cooking until night.
When they took the trail again it was in moccasins instead of mukluks. The weather was growing steadily colder and with each degree of fall in the thermometer the trail became easier.
"Mushing at fifty below zero is all right when it is all right," explained Holt in the words of the old prospector. "But when it isn't right it's hell."
"It is not fifty below yet, is it?"
"Nope. But she's on the way. When your breath makes a kinder crackling noise she's fifty."
Travel was much easier now. There was a crust on the snow that held up the dogs and the sled so that trail-breaking was not necessary. The little party pounded steadily over the barren hills. There was no sign of life except what they brought with them out of the Arctic silence and carried with them into the greater silence beyond. A little cloud of steam enveloped them as they moved, the moisture from the breath of nine moving creatures in a waste of emptiness.
Each of the men wrapped a long scarf around his mouth and nose for protection, and as the part in front of his face became a sheet of ice shifted the muffler to another place.
Night fell in the middle of the afternoon, but they kept traveling. Not till they were well up toward the summit of the divide did they decide to camp. They drove into a little draw and unharnessed the weary dogs. It was bitterly cold, but they were forced to set up the tent a
nd stove to keep from freezing. Their numbed fingers made a slow job of the camp preparations. At last the stove was going, the dogs fed, and they themselves thawed out. They fell asleep shortly to the sound of the mournful howling of the dogs outside.
Long before daybreak they were afoot again. Holt went out to chop some wood for the stove while Gordon made breakfast preparations. The little miner brought in an armful of wood and went out to get a second supply. A few moments later Elliot heard a cry.
He stepped out of the tent and ran to the spot where Holt was lying under a mass of ice and snow. The young man threw aside the broken blocks that had plunged down from a ledge above.
"Badly hurt, Gid?" he asked.
"I done bust my laig, son," the old man answered with a twisted grin.
"You mean that it is broken?"
"Tell you that in a minute."
He felt his leg carefully and with Elliot's help tried to get up. Groaning, he slid back to the snow.
"Yep. She's busted," he announced.
Gordon carried him to the tent and laid him down carefully. The old miner swore softly.