The Magnetic North Part 72

He said to himself that he would go back, and build a fire for a signal, and return; but he ran on farther and farther away from the sled and from the forest. Was it growing faintly light? He looked up.

Oh, yes; presently it would be brighter still. Those streamers of pale light dancing in the North; they would be green and scarlet and orange and purple, and the terrible white world would be illumined as by conflagration. He stopped again. That the Colonel should have dropped so far back as this, and the man in front not know--it was incredible.

What was that? A shadow on the ice. A frozen hummock? No, a man. Was it really....? Glory hallelujah--it _was!_ But the shadow lay there ghastly still and the Boy's greeting died in his throat. He had found the Colonel, but he had found him delivered over to that treacherous sleep that seldom knows a waking. The Boy dropped down beside his friend, and wasn't far off crying. But it was a tonic to young nerves to see how, like one dead, the man lay there, for all the calling and tugging by the arm. The Boy rolled the body over, pulled open the things at the neck, and thrust his hand down, till he could feel the heart beating. He jumped up, got a handful of snow, and rubbed the man's face with it. At last a feeble protest--an effort to get away from the Boy's rude succour.

"Thank G.o.d! Colonel! Colonel! wake up!"

He shook him hard. But the big man only growled sullenly, and let his leaden weight drop back heavily on the ice. The Boy got hold of the neck of the Colonel's parki and pulled him frantically along the ice a few yards, and then realised that only the terror of the moment gave him the strength to do that much. To drag a man of the Colonel's weight all the way to the wood was stark impossibility. He couldn't get him eighty yards. If he left him and went for the sled and fuel, the man would be dead by the time he got back. If he stayed, they would both be frozen in a few hours. It was pretty horrible.

He felt faint and dizzy. It occurred to him that he would pray. He was an agnostic all right, but the Colonel was past praying for himself; and here was his friend--an agnostic--here he was on his knees. He hadn't prayed since he was a little chap down in the South. How did the prayers go? "Our Father"--he looked up at the reddening aurora--"Our Father, who art in heaven--" His eyes fell again on his friend. He leapt to his feet like a wild animal, and began to go at the Colonel with his fists. The blows rained thick on the chest of the prostrate man, but he was too well protected to feel more than the shock. But now they came battering down, under the ear--right, left, as the man turned blindly to avoid them--on the jaw, even on the suffering eyes, and that at last stung the sleeper into something like consciousness.

He struggled to his feet with a roar like a wounded bull, lunging heavily forward as the Boy eluded him, and he would have pounded the young fellow out of existence in no time had he stood his ground. That was exactly what the Boy didn't mean to do--he was always just a little way on in front; but as the Colonel's half-insane rage cooled, and he slowed down a bit, the Boy was at him again like some imp of Satan.

Sound and lithe and quick-handed as he was, he was no match for the Colonel at his best. But the Colonel couldn't see well, and his brain was on fire. He'd kill that young devil, and then he'd lie down and sleep again.

Meanwhile Aurora mounted the high heavens; from a great corona in the zenith all the sky was hung with banners, and the snow was stained as if with blood. The Boy looked over his shoulder, and saw the huge figure of his friend, bearing down upon him, with his discoloured face rage-distorted, and murder in his tortured eyes. A moment's sense of the monstrous spectacle fell so poignant upon the Boy, that he felt dimly he must have been full half his life running this race with death, followed by a maniac bent on murder, in a world whose winter was strangely lit with the leaping fires of h.e.l.l.

At last, on there in front, the cliff! Below it, the sharp bend in the river, and although he couldn't see it yet, behind the cliff the forest, and a little hand-sled bearing the means of life.

The Colonel was down again, but it wasn't safe to go near him just yet.

The Boy ran on, unpacked the sled, and went, axe in hand, along the margin of the wood. Never before was a fire made so quickly. Then, with the flask, back to the Colonel, almost as sound asleep as before.

The Boy never could recall much about the hours that followed. There was n.o.body to help, so it must have been he who somehow got the Colonel to the fire, got him to swallow some food, plastered his wounded face over with the carbolic ointment, and got him into bed, for in the morning all this was seen to have been done.

They stayed in camp that day to "rest up," and the Boy shot a rabbit.

The Colonel was coming round; the rest, or the ointment, or the tea-leaf poultice, had been good for s...o...b..indness. The generous reserve of strength in his magnificent physique was quick to announce itself. He was still "frightfully bunged up," but "I think we'll push on to-morrow," he said that night, as he sat by the fire smoking before turning in.

"Right you are!" said the Boy, who was mending the sled-runner. Neither had referred to that encounter on the river-ice, that had ended in bringing the Colonel where there was succour. Nothing was said, then or for long after, in the way of deliberate recognition that the Boy had saved his life. It wasn't necessary; they understood each other.

But in the evening, after the Boy had finished mending the sled, it occurred to him he must also mend the Colonel before they went to bed.

He got out the box of ointment and bespread the strips of torn handkerchief.

"Don't know as I need that to-night," says the Colonel. "Musn't waste ointment." But the Boy brought the bandages round to the Colonel's side of the fire. For an instant they looked at each other by the flickering light, and the Colonel laid his hand on the Boy's arm. His eyes looked worse for the moment, and began to water. He turned away brusquely, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe on a log.

"What in h.e.l.l made you think of it?"

"Ask me an easy one," says the Boy. "But I know what the Jesuit Fathers would say."

"Jesuits and George Warren! Humph! precious little we'd agree about."

"You would about this. It flashed over me when I looked back and saw you peltin' after me."

"Small wonder I made for you! I'm not findin' fault, but what on earth put it into your head to go at me with your fists like that?"

"You'll never prove it by me. But when I saw you comin' at me like a mad bull, I thought to myself, thinks I, the Colonel and the Jesuits, they'd both of 'em say this was a direct answer to prayer."

CHAPTER XIII

THE PIT

"L'humanite a commence tout entiere par le crime .... C'etait le vieux nourricier des hommes des cavernes."--ANATOLE FRANCE.

An old story now, these days of silent plodding through the driving snow.

But if outward conditions lacked variety, not so their c.u.mulative effect upon poor human nature. A change was going on in the travellers that will little commend them to the sentimentalist.

"I've come to think a snow-storm's all right to travel in, all right to sleep in," said the Colonel one morning; "but to cook in, eat in, make or break camp in--it's the devil's champion invention." For three days they had worked like galley-slaves, and yet covered less than ten miles a day. "And you never get rested," the Colonel went on; "I get up as tired as I go to bed." Again the Boy only nodded. His body, if not his temper, had got broken into the trail, but for a talkative person he had in these days strangely little to say. It became manifest that, in the long run, the Colonel would suffer the most physically; but his young companion, having less patience and more ambition, more sheer untamed vitality in him, would suffer the most in spirit. Every sense in him was becoming numbed, save the gnawing in his stomach, and that other, even more acute ache, queer compound of fatigue and anger. These two sensations swallowed up all else, and seemed to grow by what they fed on.

The loaded sled was a nightmare. It weighed a thousand tons. The very first afternoon out from Anvik, when in the desperate hauling and tugging that rescued it from a bottomless snow-drift, the las.h.i.+ng slipped, the load loosened, tumbled off, and rolled open, the Colonel stood quite still and swore till his half-frozen blood circulated freely again. When it came to repacking, he considered in detail the items that made up the intolerable weight, and fell to wondering which of them they could do without.

The second day out from Anvik they had decided that it was absurd, after all, to lug about so much tinware. They left a little saucepan and the extra kettle at that camp. The idea, so potent at Anvik, of having a tea-kettle in reserve--well, the notion lost weight, and the kettle seemed to gain.

Two pairs of boots and some flannels marked the next stopping-place.

On the following day, when the Boy's rifle kept slipping and making a brake to hold back the sled, "I reckon you'll have to plant that rifle o' yours in the next big drift," said the Colonel; "one's all we need, anyway."

"One's all you need, and one's all I need," answered the Boy stiffly.

But it wasn't easy to see immediate need for either. Never was country so bare of game, they thought, not considering how little they hunted, and how more and more every faculty, every sense, was absorbed in the bare going forward.

The next time the Colonel said something about the uselessness of carrying two guns, the Boy flared up: "If you object to guns, leave yours."

This was a new tone for the Boy to use to the Colonel.

"Don't you think we'd better hold on to the best one?"

Now the Boy couldn't deny that the Colonel's was the better, but none the less he had a great affection for his own old 44 Marlin, and the Colonel shouldn't a.s.sume that he had the right to dictate. This att.i.tude of the "wise elder" seemed out of place on the trail.

"A gun's a necessity. I haven't brought along any whim-whams."

"Who has?"

"Well, it wasn't me that went loadin' up at Anvik with fool thermometers and things."

"Thermometer! Why, it doesn't weigh--"

"Weighs something, and it's something to pack; frozen half the time, too. And when it isn't, what's the good of havin' it hammered into us how near we are to freezin' to death." But it annoyed him to think how very little in argument a thermometer weighed against a rifle.

They said no more that day about lightening the load, but with a double motive they made enormous inroads upon their provisions.

A morning came when the Colonel, packing hurriedly in the biting cold, forgot to shove his pardner's gun into its accustomed place.

The Boy, returning from trail-breaking to the river, kicked at the b.u.t.t to draw attention to the omission. The Colonel flung down the end of the ice-coated rope he had lashed the load with, and, "Pack it yourself," says he.

The Boy let the rifle lie. But all day long he felt the loss of it heavy on his heart, and no reconciling lightness in the sled.

The Colonel began to have qualms about the double rations they were using. It was only the seventeenth night after turning their backs on the Big Chimney, as the Colonel tipped the pan, pouring out half the boiled beans into his pardner's plate, "That's the last o' the strawberries! Don't go expectin' any more," says he.