XXIII
In a little while Ned stripped the pelt from the warm body of the wolf and continued down his line of traps. He was able to think more coherently now and consider methods and details. And by the same token of clear thought, he was brought face to face with the fact of the almost insuperable obstacles in his path.
For all he could see now, Doomsdorf had surrounded them with a stone wall. He had seemingly thought of everything, prepared for every contingency, and left them not the slightest gateway to hope.
Plans for freedom first of all seemingly had to include Doomsdorf's death. That was the first essential, and the last. Could they succeed in striking the life from their master, they could wait in the cabin until the trader Intrepid should touch their island in the spring. It can be said for Ned that he conjectured upon the plan without the slightest whisper of remorse, the least degree of false sentiment. The fact that their master was, more or less, a human being did not change the course of his thought whatever. He would hurl that wicked soul out of the world with never an instant's pity, and his only prayer would be that it might fall into the real hell that he had tried to imitate on earth. There could be no question about that. If, through some mercy, the brute lay helpless for a single second at his feet, it would be time enough for the deed Ned had in mind. His arm would never falter, his cruel axe would shatter down as pitilessly as upon some savage beast of the forest. He had not forgotten what the three of them had endured.
The difficulty lay in finding an opening of attack. Doomsdorf's rifle was never loaded except when it was in his arms, and he wore his pistol in his belt, day and night. For all his hopelessness, Ned had noticed, half inadvertently, that he always took precautions against a night attack. The squaw slept on the outside of their cot and would be as difficult to pass without arousing as a sleeping dog. The cabin itself was bolted, not to be entered without waking both occupants; and the three prisoners of course slept in the newer cabin.
Bess had told him of Doomsdorf's encounter with Knutsen, describing with particular emphasis the speed with which the murderer had whipped out his pistol. He could get it into action long before Ned could lay bare his clasp knife. Indeed, mighty man that he was, he could crush Ned to earth with one bound at the latter's first offensive movement. And Doomsdorf was always particularly watchful when Ned carried his axe.
Yet the fact remained that in his axe alone lay the only possible hope of success. Some time Ned might see an opportunity to swing it down: perhaps he could think of some wile to put Doomsdorf at a disadvantage. It was inconceivable that they should try to escape without first rendering Doomsdorf helpless to follow them. They could attempt neither to conceal themselves on the island, or cross the ice straight to Tzar Island without the absolute certainty of being hunted down and punished. What form that punishment would take Ned dared not guess.
It was true that Doomsdorf kept but a perfunctory watch over Ned and Bess while they plied their trap lines. But long ago he had explained to them the hopelessness of attempting to load their backs with food and strike off across the ice on the slim chance of encountering some inhabited island. The plan, he had said, had not been worth a thought, and even now, in spite of his new courage, Ned found that it promised little. In the first place, to venture out into that infinity of ice, where there was not a stick of fuel and the polar wind was an icy demon day and night, meant simply to die without great question or any considerable delay. The islands were many, but the gray ice between them insuperably broad and rough. As Doomsdorf had said, they could not get much of a start; scarcely a day went by but that Doomsdorf, from some point of vantage where his daily hunting excursions carried him, discerned the distant forms of one or both of his two trappers across the snowy barrens; and he would be quick to investigate if they were missing. His powerful legs and mighty strength would enable him to overtake the runaways in the course of a few hours. But lastly, settling the matter once and for all, there was the subject of Lenore. He could neither smuggle her out nor leave her to Doomsdorf's vengeance.
The plan might be worth considering, except for her. Of course, the odds would be tragically long on the side of failure; but all he dared pray for was a fighting chance. As matters lay, it was wholly out of the question.
Seemingly the only course was to lie low, always to be on the watch for the moment of opportunity. Some time, perhaps, their master's vigilance would relax. Just one little instant of carelessness on his part might show the way. Perhaps the chance would come when the Intrepid put into the island to buy the season's furs, if indeed life dwelt in his own body until that time. Ned didn't forget that long, weary months of winter still lay between.
He concluded that he would not take Lenore into his confidence at once. That would come later,—when he had something definite to propose. Lately she had not shown great confidence in him, scorning his ability to shelter her and serve her; and of course she would have only contempt for any such vague hope as this. He had nothing to offer now but the assurance of his own growing sense of power. As yet his hope lay wholly in the realization of the late growth and development of his own character. So far as material facts went, the barriers between her and her liberty were as insuperable as ever. He would not be able to encourage her: more likely, by her contempt, she would jeopardize his own belief in himself. Besides, for all his great love for her, he could not make himself believe that she was of fighting metal. He found, in this moment of analysis of her soul, that he could not look to her for aid. She was his morning star, all that he could ask in woman, and he had chosen her for her worth and beauty, rather than for a helpmate, a fortress at his side. Yes, coöperation with her might injure, rather than increase, his chances for success.
He dismissed in an instant the idea of telling Bess. His loyalty to Lenore demanded that, at least. She must not go where his own betrothed was excluded. If the thought came that Bess, by light of courage and fortitude, had already gone where in weakness and self-pity Lenore could not possibly follow—the windy snow fields and the bitter crests of the rugged hills—he pushed it sternly from him. The whole thing was a matter of instinct with him, perhaps a wish to shield himself from invidious comparisons of the two girls. He would have liked to convince himself that Lenore could be his ally, but he was wholly unable to do so. Realizing that, he preferred to believe that Bess was likewise incompetent. But he knew he must not let his mind dwell to any great length upon the subject. He might be forced to change his mind.
He must make a lone fight. He must follow a lone trail—like the old gray pack leader whose sluts cannot keep pace.
Thereafter, day and night, Ned watched his chances. Never he climbed to the top of the ridge but that he searched, with straining eyes, for the glimpse of a dog-sledge on the horizon, or perhaps the faint line of a distant island. On the nights that he spent at the home cabin, he made an intense study of Doomsdorf's most minor habits, trying to uncover some little failing, some trifling carelessness that might give him his opportunity. He made it a point to leave his axe in easy reaching distance; his clasp knife, in a holster of fur, was always open in his pocket, always ready to his hand. All day, down the weary length of his trap line, he considered ways and means.
Simply because the wild continued to train him, he was ever stronger for this great, ultimate trial. Not only his intent was stronger, his courage greater, but his body also continued its marvelous development. His muscles were like those of a grizzly: great bunches of tendons, hard as stone, moving under his white skin. Every motion was lithe and strong; his energy was a never-failing fountain; his eyes were vivid and clear against the old-leather hue of his face.
There was no longer an unpleasant discoloration in the whites of his eyes. They were a cold, hard, pale blue; and the little network of lines that had once shown faintly at his cheek bones had completely faded. His hands had killing strength; his neck was a brown pillar of muscle. Health was upon him, in its full glory, to the full meaning of the word.
He found, to his great amazement, that his mental powers had similarly developed. His thought was more clear, and it flowed in deeper channels. It was no effort for him now to follow one line of thought to its conclusion. The tendency to veer off in the direction of least resistance had been entirely overcome. He could be of some aid, now, in the fur house of Godfrey Cornet. He felt he would like to match wits with his father's competitors.
He would need not only this great physical strength, but also his enhanced mental powers in the trial and stress that were to come. Doomsdorf's tyranny could not be endured forever; they were being borne along toward a crisis as if on an ocean current. And for all his growth, Ned never made the fatal mistake of considering himself a physical match for Doomsdorf. Over and above the fact that the latter was armed with rifle and pistol, Ned was still a child in his hands. It was simply a case of intrinsic limitations. It was as if the wolf, chain-lightning savagery that he is, should try to lay low the venerable grizzly bear.
Sooner or later the crisis would fall upon them,—a fit of savage anger on Doomsdorf's part, or a wrong that could not be endured, even if death were the penalty for rebellion. Moreover, Ned could not escape the haunting fear that such a crisis was actually imminent. Doomsdorf's mood was an uncertain thing at best; and lately it had taken a turn for the worse. He was not getting the satisfaction that he had anticipated out of Ned's slavery; the situation had lost its novelty, and he was open to any Satanic form of diversion that might occur to him. Ned had mastered his trap lines, had stood the gaff and was a better man on account of it; and it was time his master provided additional entertainment for him. In these dark, winter days he remembered the Siberian prison with particular vividness, and at such times the steely glitter was more pronounced in his eyes, and certain things that he had seen lingered ever in his mind. He kept remembering strange ghosts of men, toiling in the snow till they died, and souls that went out screaming under the lash; and such remembrances moved him with a dark, unspeakable lust. He thought he would like to bring these memory-pictures to life. Besides, his attitude toward Bess was ever more sinister. He followed her motions with a queer, searching, speculative gaze; and now and then he offered her little favors.
If he could only be held in restraint a few months more. Ned knew perfectly that the longer the crisis could be averted, the better his chance for life and liberty. He would have more opportunity to make preparations, to lay plans. Besides, every day that he followed his trap line he was better trained—in character and mind and body—for the test to come. The work of bringing out Ned Cornet's manhood had never ceased.
Every day he had learned more of those savage natural forces that find clearest expression in the North. He knew the wind and the cold, snow-slide and blizzard, but also he knew hunger and fear and travail and pain. All these things taught him what they had to teach, and all of them served to shape him into the man he had grown to be. And one still, clear afternoon the North sent home a new realization of its power.
He was working that part of the line from his Twelve-Mile cabin over the ridge toward the Forks cabin,—his old rendezvous with Bess. He was somewhat late in crossing the range to-day. He had taken several of the larger fur-bearers and had been obliged to skin them laboriously, first thawing them out over a fire in the snow, so that midafternoon found him just emerging from the thick copse where he had killed the white wolf. The blazed trail took him around the shoulder of the ridge, clear to the edge of a little, deeply seamed glacier such as crowns so many of the larger hills in the far North.
Few were the wild creatures that traversed this icy desolation, so his trap line had been laid out around the glacier, following the blazed trail in the scrub timber. But to-day the long way round was particularly grievous to his spirit. More than a mile could be saved by leaving the timber and climbing across the ice, and only a few sets, none of which had ever proved especially productive, would be missed. In his first few weeks the danger of going astray had kept him close to his line, but he was not obliged to take it into consideration now. He knew his country end to end.
Without an instant's hesitation he turned from the trail straight over the snowy summit toward the cabin. The cut-off would save him the annoyance of making camp after dark. And since he had climbed it once before, he scarcely felt the need of extra caution.
The crossing, however, was not quite the same as on the previous occasion. Before the ice had been covered, completely across, with a heavy snowfall, no harder to walk on than the open barrens. He soon found now that the snow prevailed only to the summit of the glacier, and the descent beyond the summit had been swept clean by the winds.
Below him stretched a half-mile of glare ice, ivory white like the fangs of some fabulous beast of prey. Here and there it was gashed with crevices,—those deep glacier chasms into which a stone falls in silence. For a moment Ned regarded it with considerable displeasure.
He was not equipped for ice scaling. Perhaps it was best not to try to go on. But as he waited, the long way down and around seemed to grow in his imagination. It was that deadly hour of late afternoon when the founts of energy run low and the thought-mechanism is dulled by fatigue;—and some way, he felt his powers of resistance slipping away from him. He forget, for the moment, the Fear that is the very soul of wisdom.
He decided to take a chance. He removed his snowshoes and ventured carefully out upon the ice.
It was easier than it looked. His moccasins clung very well. Steadily gaining confidence, he walked at a faster pace. The slope was not much on this side, the glacier ending in an abrupt cliff many hundred feet in height, so he felt little need of especial precaution. It was, in fact, the easiest walking that he had had since his arrival upon the island, so he decided not to turn off clear until he reached the high ground just to one side of the ice cliff. He crawled down a series of shelves, picked his way about a jagged promontory, and fetched up at last at the edge of a dark crevice scarcely fifty feet from the edge of the snow.
The crevice was not much over five feet wide at this point, and looking along, he saw that a hundred yards to his right it ended in a snowbank. But there was no need of following it down. He could leap it at a standing jump: with a running start he could bound ten feet beyond.
He was tired, eager to get to camp,—and this was the zero hour. He drew back three paces, preparatory to making the leap.
As he halted he was somewhat amazed at the incredible depth of silence that enthralled this icy realm. It seemed to him, except for the beat of his own heart, the absolute zero of silence,—not a whimper of wind or the faintest rustle of whisking snow dust. All the wilderness world seemed to be straining—listening. The man leaped forward.
At that instant the North gave him some sign of its power. His first running step was firm, but at the second his moccasin failed to hold, slipping straight back. He pitched forward on his hands and knees, grasping at the hard, slippery ice.
But he had not realized his momentum. He experienced a strange instant of hovering, of infinite suspense; and then the realization, like a flash of lightning, of complete and immutable disaster. There was no sense of fast motion. He slid rather slowly, with that sickening helplessness that so often characterizes the events of a tragic dream; and the wilderness seemed still to be waiting, watching, in unutterable indifference. Then he pitched forward into the crevice.
To Ned it seemed beyond the least, last possibility of hope that he should ever know another conscious second. The glacier crevices were all incredibly deep, and he would fall as a stone falls, crushed at last on the lightless floor of the glacier so far below that no sound might rise to disturb this strange immensity of silence. It was always thus with wilderness deaths. There is no sign that the Red Gods ever see. All things remain as they were,—the eternal silence, the wild creatures absorbed in their occupations; the trees never lifting their bowed heads from their burdens of snow. Ned did not dream that mortal eyes would ever rest upon his form again, vanishing without trace except for the axe that had fallen at the edge of the crevice and the imprint of his snowshoes on the trail behind. There was no reason in heaven or earth for doubting but that this ivory glacier would be his sepulcher forever.
In that little instant the scope of his mind was incredibly vast. His thought was more clear and true than ever before in his life, and it was faster than the lightning in the sky. It reached back throughout his years; it encompassed in full his most subtle and intricate relations with life. There was no sense of one thought coming after another. The focus of his attention had been immeasurably extended; and all that he knew, and all that he was and had been, was before his eyes in one great, infinite vista.
He still had time in plenty to observe the immensity of the silence; the fact that his falling had not disturbed, to the least fraction of a degree, the vast imperturbability of the stretching snow fields about him. In that same instant, because of the seeming certainty of his end, he really escaped from fear. Fear in its true sense is a relation that living things have with the uncertainties of the future: a device of nature by which the species are warned of danger, but it can serve no purpose when judgment is signed and sealed. This was not danger but seeming certainty; and the mind was too busy with other subjects to give place to such a useless thing as fear.
By the same token he could not truly be said to hope. Hope also is the handmaiden of uncertainty. Glancing back, there was no great sense of regret. Seemingly dispatched irrevocably out of the world, in that flash of an instant he was suddenly almost indifferent toward it. He remembered Lenore clearly, seeing her more vividly than he had ever seen her before, but she was like an old photograph found buried in a forgotten drawer,—recalling something that was of greatest moment once, but which no longer mattered. Perhaps, seemingly facing certain death, he was as one of the dead, seeing everything in the world from an indifferent and detached viewpoint.
All these thoughts swept him in a single fraction of an instant as he plunged into darkness. And all of them were unavailing. The uncertainty that shadows the lives of men held sway once more; and with it a ghastly and boundless terror.
He was not to die at once. There was still hope of life. He fetched up, as if by a miracle, on an icy shelf ten feet below the mouth of the crevice,—with sheer walls rising on each side.