“That depends. If the crust continues to bear the mules all the way, we can make splendid time—I should think a day and a night ought to do it.”
“Camping on the snow,” groaned the Doctor.
“I fear so. When I passed here before it was summer, and I remember no inn, not even a guard house, in fact, until we reached this point.”
“In which case we may as well make the best of Ah Schow’s breakfast,” I added, for the adept had turned back with us and we were now near the door of the guard house, before which Maurice was pacing up and down, smoking his pipe on an empty stomach, as I had begged him in vain not to do at least a hundred times.
After that we all went in and sat down around the bowl of smoking tsamba and a few trifles of our own in the way of canned goods to help it out.
There were four of us now, besides Ah Schow, when before there had been only three.
The fourth was Walla Benjow, the girl we had taken from the storm.
And the fifth—the father?
Dead, and lying in the shallow grave, which we, with immense difficulty, had managed to dig in a sheltered spot behind the guard house wall.
I remember, and with a shudder, even now, just how he looked when we brought him in and placed him on the k’ang. His head hung down, his arms seemed glued to his sides, his face was as white as wax, and the half open eyes glassy, with little icicles hanging from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth.
But I do not think he was dead then; at least the Doctor assured us he was not, and once, I will swear, I saw his eyes roll upward and fix themselves on me with a ghastly stare.
He must have ceased to suffer though, long before that, for he was frozen stiff when we found him. Old blood flows slowly—this man’s had ceased to circulate within a few minutes after we laid him on the k’ang, although we all did what we could for him; even the Doctor, roused to sympathy, exercising all his skill, which was by no means slight.
What a singular procession we must have formed when Philpot opened the door and we filed into the room.
Mr. Mirrikh, whose strength was stupendous, carried the
