CHAPTER XV.
It was harder now that I was alone, scant as was my load. I had but two dogs, Malicula, loyal and steady, and Barsick, the undemonstrative, as companions; for another dog had been left behind, back there in the tent in the woods, where Kentuck was alone.
All day long we tugged together, dogs and master. So long had Malicula followed those other sled tracks, traced out like a faint road in the snow, and frozen into little rough lines, that he took the road instinctively. For hours at a stretch, I did not look at the land around me, save to remember landmarks, looking backward and stamping on my memory the details that I must remember for my return in case the shroud of snow obliterated the trail.
Now it was a hummock in the wide expanse; then it was a group of trees. Again it would be a lone pinnacle of a hill, and a wide tundra, where I noted my compass, and dragged off my mittens to write, with stiff, cramped fingers, the pointing of the needle. I was divided between two cares—solicitude to remember the backward route to where lay that brave, helpless, crippled man; and watchfulness ahead.
On the sled in front of me, caught by a mere string that could be broken, lay Dan's rifle, loaded; for I proposed to take no chances in case of conflict with the desperate Indian adventurer ahead. Not only was my own life at stake, but that of Kentuck, left behind, and to whom sooner or later I must return and assist, lest he die there miserably, in that terrible isolation. And always I was alert, constantly fearing that I should come upon the Hatchet so close that he would sense me, and lie in ambush to murder. Again I would steady myself with the thought, repeated aloud, that he would not pause until he came to those high mountains where stood three pinnacles, in distorted shapes, the pinnacles of the legend and the curse.
I camped late, and was grateful, in a peculiarly puerile way, to the Hatchet for having left me a wikiup, which gave shelter and a bed of boughs, the remnants of a charred log, and a piece of a snowshoe thong. I had but a robe, and the dogs slept on either side of me, their warm bodies lending comfort—Malicula bravely taking the outer edge, and the worn Barsick, black-coated, the inner. I talked to them as we ate together, and laid down to rest together, and I knew for the first time the depths of canine sympathy and companionship. Ah, I was learning; and coming nearer to nature's heart, away off up there in the frozen, uncharted lands on which God Himself seemed to have set His seal of isolation!
I slept late, because I was tired out, and took the trail reluctantly. Ahead of me was nothing but the rolling tundra. I may have plodded hours without noticing it, but I suddenly discovered something new and foreboding in the pale signs of the snow. They were tracks, huge and menacing, the tracks of timber wolves. They ventured alongside that other trail, and at times passed over it, obliterating it with the marks of broad, spread pads.
Persistently they were there, always defined remorselessly, as if they had scented and followed the Hatchet, and bided their time, as he must have bided his when he knew that behind him were men whom he proposed to make his prey. They were still there when the dusk made the trailing difficult, and I stopped watching them, leaving it to the intelligence of the great, gray beast ahead to keep the tracks, and bring me to a camping place. He stopped at last, and we were in a little draw, where willows, swept by early winter winds, reared their tops above the snow, melancholy and plumelike.
On this night there was no friendly shelter of trees, only those thin branches, congealed in the icy cold, still ind immovable, above,the place where the Hatchet had slept, and where we slept. But to-night the dogs huddled closer.
In the morning I bent over to study the strange writing around me. There was something peculiar in it. I stopped and picked it up. It was an empty shell of a repeating rifle. I found another. Again my foot struck something hard. It was the skull of a dog, polished to an ivory white. I wandered farther, more intent on my search. I found another skull, this time of a wolf, and farther out the vertebræ of two other dogs. Around all was that confusion of tracks. I hurried out in widening circles to examine the trail in the dim light of the morning. It was plain.
When the Hatchet left that camp he had no dogs, but pulled his sled alone. The good fight he had made had not saved his team from that murderous and silent horde of gray. They had followed him, and fallen on his dogs, and though he shot to protect them, had feasted upon them and their own dead. The wolves were his final enemies. A chill went through my heart, and yet I reasoned that, inasmuch as I had heard no cry, they must have passed on, and I prayed to God they would not scent me and return.
Purposely I delayed when I found his next camp, which was early in the evening. I waited until the light was strong, and studied it. The wolf tracks were nowhere around. I sighed with relief as we started, for it proved to me that after that one desperate raid they had followed him no farther.
I passed with a lighter heart up a long series of low-lying hills, and then, at the top, paused with a long cry of excitement.
Shining in the distance, as cold and hard as signposts of fate, were three pinnacles rising from a chain of low mountains. Ghastly and white they appeared when outlined against the dense blue of the sky. And the trail headed toward them, straight as the flight of an arrow. They paled away as the day died out, and I did not hasten, fearing all the time to surprise this deadly character, who had struggled on, over dead bodies, to his ambition,
Without a fire, and out there on the rolling tundra, we slept, and I ate dog fish with the dogs, and rolled myself in my robes, and went to sleep, under the scant edge of the tarpaulin pulled across by the side of the upturned sled, in a foreboding blackness. The stars did not shine, and the dogs crawled closer and whimpered a little, as if sensing something beyond my intuition or perception.
I awoke in the night, and listened. Across the wastes came the creeping, stealthy sounds of something—the army of the snow set marching by the wind, and sweeping around to annihilate me. I shuddered, and could no longer sleep. The wind was not high, but it carried a menacing message, the whisper of death riding on the wings of the night. Drifts piled beside us, rendering our place warm and sheltered, with a false, soothing warmness, alluring and lethic.
I listened for it to increase, but it did not. It merely continued to sweep across ceaselessly, as if it were but the sound of that army—that army of snow crystals released from the frozen surfaces to overwhelm me. But I swore they had not come to conquer me here, and, long before morning, had resolved to face it at the first light of dawn. It must be that the mountain range was but a few miles beyond me, and that, in the shadow of those barricades, I should find still air, and fuel of some sort, if nothing more than the humble pussy willow of the watercourses.
The dogs whimpered and whined as I harnessed them after our cold morning meal, and went fearfully and with turned heads into the cutting gale. Their feet were raw, and spots of red marked their footsteps as they struggled forward.
The dawn came, like a twilight, chilling and steady. The trail was obliterated for the first time in that long journey, but we had the landmarks in view, faintly visible through the snow dust, and toward the range we headed, fighting our way foot by foot, and caring nothing for guiding tracks. The fear of surprising the Hatchet was lost in the face of that more imminent fear of dying, out there in a blizzard, We stiffly fought our way up a slope, and dropped down into a valley, where I presumed a stream ran in summer, and as suddenly as we descended its slopes the wind died.
The dogs took courage and strength, and moved faster, A clear, dark line was between me and the foot of the hills, which rose, abrupt and rugged, as if carved from the snow and ice. As we drew closer, I saw that their tops were so precipitous that snow had failed to find lodgment, and gave a sigh of momentary enjoyment, for there, discernible in the distance, were the shapes of the needle, the satanic outline, and the resting eagle!
Somewhere at their bases the trail would end. Somewhere at their feet was this undisturbed treasure, which had lured so many of us into these desolations, the lure for whose answer some of us had paid with our lives.
In a stillness rendered more profound by contrast with the storm from which we had emerged, we plodded forward. I saw that the dogs were sniffing now and then at the trail, and stopped them, and went ahead to brush away the surface snow with my mittens. It was there beneath, heading as were we, toward the peaks, the trail of the sled. We were still in the direct line, and now it would be but a short time until the end of the quest would be opened to view and action. I took the rifle from its lashings, saw that the lever worked, and laid it where it could be seized in an instant. The Hatchet must shoot true with his first shot, otherwise our chances would be equalized.
As we advanced, I strained my eyes for any thread of smoke to betray his camp; but nowhere was there anything to show that this waste had ever been violated by a human being. I was more alert as we approached the thin timber, and carried my rifle on my arm, waiting for the opening of the battle, or a shout of warning.
None came. I was strung to the utmost tension, until my overwrought nerves vibrated when we passed into the birches and firs, all scrubby and scant.
I halted the dogs, and listened; but there was no sound, only a silence so vast that it was oppressive and tangible. It was as if the air itself, the coldness, the stillness, were weights suspended over me for my destruction. It was as if all the forces of nature were assembled to exterminate me when I had taken another step into that mysterious region of the accursed; as if the sagas and warriors of all the dead tribes were marshaling to bar my way, and sweep me from existence for my temerity.
It may have been my nerves, or it may have been something else—an underlying fear that there was something supernatural in this region which I had invaded; but I was afraid! My hair was on end, and bristled. There in the broad day I saw shapes in the trees, and heard sinister sounds, menacing me. I should have welcomed the sight of the Sioux and conflict with something which I could see and understand. I was not afraid to die, but I was afraid of the phantoms conjured by my fears. It was all so still, so ghastly white, so terribly alone! Even the dogs appeared to sense it by their faltering, cautious steps, and crowded so close on me that Malicula once trod upon the ends of my long snowshoes, and almost threw me.
Again I stopped and looked for signs, walking warily backward and forward. A broken twig was my reward, and I stopped, as before, and swept away the snow. The trail was still there, leading through the thicket, where the Hatchet had gone steadily on. I left the dogs behind, and took the course, crouching behind the closest trees, and with my rifle hammer raised, and a finger in my mitten upon the trigger, cold and nervous. Step by step I slipped forward, peering this way and that in search of something—anything—that would expose the native who to me was the living death.
Suddenly, as I descended farther into what seemed to be the bed of a frozen stream, I saw a shape. It was his crude shelter, but from it there arose no smoke. I crept forward now, slowly and with caution, fearing that in the intense stillness the slipping of my snowshoes over the snow would betray me. I gained the shelter, and looked around its corner. Its ashes were cold, and covered with a light drift of snow. I parted the fir boughs of this three-sided abode, and looked more closely.
From the pole above, against which leaned lopped limbs of heavy trees, with snow piled on top to give shelter and warmth, were hanging the scant sacks of his outfit. His blankets were thrown back in confusion, and his sled was upturned outside. His ax was where he had struck it into the side of a log, and his frying pan and coffeepot and kettle, blackened many camp fires, were thrown carelessly into a corner. But there were no tracks.
For a long time I wondered at this, trying to reason out why it should be so. Here was his outfit, everything he had, and yet the fire was old, and everything appeared deserted. I could not imagine what had happened. I took courage from the fact that there were no signs in the new snow, which at that place must have been three or four days old, so lowered my rifle, and walked around for a closer inspection. It was plain that this was his outfit, left there in loneliness.
I kicked the log which had been laid in front of this crude dwelling place, but there was not a spark left in its charred sides. I stepped farther out, and looked around me. Nothing was in sight save this sole abrasion on nature. Above me rose the three peaks, towering up into the deathly air. The trees stood as still as if carved from stone. Fifty or seventy-five feet beyond me ran something black and steaming on the surface. I walked toward it, wondering if I were to see another phenomena of the arctic, a spring so hot that it never froze. It ran for some distance before being masked with ice.
Almost at its brink my foot struck a bump in the snow. I did not notice it at the instant, for I was looking down into the bed of a stream running across a bed rock which was almost bare, but in whose leaves were long stringers of brilliant red, the red of the red gold!
I stumbled forward and slipped my feet from the thongs, and jerked off my mittens, and thrust my hands into that heated water poured forth from the fiery heart of the earth—or was it hell?—and caught up and let fall through them that lavish stream of gold.
It was there! Gold in greater abundance than I have ever seen! Gold that dripped from my wet fingers, and splashed back into the clear, warm water. Gold in such abundance that under my eyes lay a fortune. A stream almost paved with it, as if all the red gold of the world had been collected there to await my coming! Farther and farther I plunged my hands, and piled it at the water's edge, a heap of it, until I had a pyramid, a fortune, the life's savings of many men, the sum of luxury, the dream of a miser!
Above me the peaks still stood in their strange shapes, looking own like so many judges ready to pass sentence. Above them was the cold, discerning sky, and beyond them the immutable spaces that had waited my coming. I was mad! I was bereft of all sense!
I plunged into the stream, forgetful of the menace of the Hatchet, of the cold air, of the dangers of freezing when I stepped out, and walked through the shallow water.
I walked on gold, red gold! It was there! Mine! All I had to do was to scoop it up, each handful placing me higher on the ladder of the luxuries of life. My situation, my desperate condition, Kentucky Smith—everything was forgotten in that baptism of hot water as I stared with bulging eyes at the gold beneath my feet.
I was disturbed by a sound of something—wood striking wood, and down through the trees came the dogs, Malicula and Barsick, dragging the sled after them, and looking at me with appealing eyes. They were calling me to reason—bringing me back to reality! I waded back toward them, and stepped out on the bank. Again my foot struck the object which I had first encountered, and it rolled away, and lodged but a few feet beyond. I stepped over and picked it up. It was a skull, freshly cleaned by ravenous teeth, and as I held its gruesome face toward me I saw that in the hollow grin was a broken tooth capped with silver. And almost beside it was something else. Even in that horrible moment I stooped to pick up the moccasins of gold.