Part 16

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.

XXIV

Ned knew what fear was, well enough, as he lay in the darkened chasm, staring up at the white line of the crevice above him. The old love of life welled back, sweeping his spirit as in a flood, and with it all the hopes and fears of which life is made. He remembered Lenore, now. Her image was not just a lovely photograph of a past day,—a silvery daguerreotype of a happiness forgotten. He remembered again his debt of service to her, his dear companionship for Bess, his dreams of escape from the island. Rallying his scattered faculties, he tried to analyze his desperate position.

The shelf on which he had fallen was scarcely wider than his body, and only because it projected at an upward incline from the sheer wall had he come to rest upon it. It was perhaps fifty feet long, practically on a level all the way. The wall was sheer for ten feet above him; beyond the shelf was only the impenetrable darkness of the crevice, extending apparently into the bowels of the earth.

Could he climb the wall? There was no other conceivable possibility of rescue. No one knew where he was; no one would come to look for him. Moreover, his escape must be immediate,—within a few hours at most. There was no waiting for Doomsdorf to come to look for him in the morning light. He was dressed in the warmest clothes, but even these could not repel the frightful cold of the glaciers.

Cool-headed, with perfect self-mastery, he shifted himself on the ledge to determine if he had been injured in the fall. He was drawn and shuddering with pain, but that alone was not an index. Often the more serious injuries result in a temporary paralysis that precludes pain. If any bones were broken he was beaten at the start. But his arms and legs moved in obedience to his will, and there seemed nothing to fear from this.

Very cautiously, in imminent danger of pitching backward into the abyss, he climbed to his feet. He was a tall man, but his hands, reaching up, did not come within two feet of the ledge. And there was nothing whatever for his hands to cling to.

If only there were irregularities in the ice. With a surge of hope he thought of his axe.

This tool, however, had either fallen into the crevice or had dropped from his shoulder and lay on the ice above. But there remained his clasp knife. He drew it carefully from his pocket.

Already he felt the icy chill of the glacier stealing through him, the cold fingers of death itself. He must lose no time in going to work. He began to cut, two feet above the ledge, a sharp-edged hole in the ice.

Brittle ice is not easy to cut with a knife. It was a slow, painful process. He knew at once that he must work with care,—any irregular cut would not give him foothold. But Ned was working for his life; and his hand was facile as never before.

He finished the cut at last, then started on another a foot above. He hewed out a foothold with great care.

In spite of his warm gloves and the hard exercise of cutting, the numbing, biting frost was getting to his fingers. But he mustn’t let his hand grow stiff and awkward. He did not forget that the handholds, to which his fingers must cling, were yet to be made. They had to be finished with even greater skill than the footholds. Very wisely, he turned to them next.

He made the first of them as high as he could reach. Then he put one in about a foot below. Three more footholds were put in at about twelve-inch intervals between.

At that point he found it necessary to stop and spend a few of his precious moments in rest. He must not let fatigue dull him and take the cunning from his hand. But the first stage of the work was done;—deliverance looked already immeasurably nearer. If he could climb up, then cling on and cut a new hold! Placing the knife between his teeth, he put his moccasin into the first foothold and pulled himself up.

It did not take long, however, to convince him that the remaining work bordered practically on the impossible. These holes in the ice were not like irregularities in stone. The fingers slipped over them: it was almost impossible to cling on with both hands, much less one. But clinging with all his might, he tried to free his right hand to procure his knife.

He made it at last, and at a frightful cost of nervous energy succeeded in cutting some sort of a gash in the icy wall above his head. Standing so close he could not look up, it was impossible to do more than hack out a ragged hole. And because life lay this way and no other, he put the blade once more between his teeth, reached his right hand into the hole, and tried to pull himself up again.

But disaster, bitter and complete, followed that attempt. His numbing hands failed to hold under the strain, and he slipped all the way back to his shelf. Something rang sharply against the ice wall, far below him.

He did not hear it again; but the truth went home to him in one despairing instant. Try as hard as he could, his jaws had released their hold upon the knife, and it had fallen into the depths of the crevice below. He was not in the least aware of the vicious wound its blade had cut in his shoulder, of the warm blood that was trickling down under his furs. He only knew, with that cold fatalism with which the woodsman regards life, that he had fought a good fight,—and he had lost.

There was no use of trying any more. He had no other knife or axe, no tool that could hack a hole in the icy wall. What other things he carried about him—the furs on his back, his box of safety matches, and other minor implements of his trade—could not help him in the least. And soon it became increasingly difficult to think either upon the fight he had made or the fate that awaited him.

It was hard to remember anything but the growing cold.

It hurt worst in his hands. So he took to rubbing his hands together, hard as he could. He felt the blood surge back into them, and soon they were fairly warm in the great mittens of fur.

Directly he settled back on his icy shelf and drew the pelts he had taken that day over his shoulders. There was but one hope left; and such as it was, it was curiously allied with despair. He hoped that he had heard true that when frost steals into the veins it comes with gentleness and ease. Perhaps he would simply go to sleep.

It wouldn’t be a long time. In fact, a great drowsiness, not unpleasant but rather peaceful, was already settling upon him. The cold of the glacier was deadly. Not many moments remained of his time on earth. The death that dwells in the Arctic ice is mercifully swift.

He had counted on hours, at least. He had even anticipated lingering far into the night. But this was only _moments_! The cleft above him was still distinctly gray.

The ice was creeping again into his fingers. But he wouldn’t try to shake it out again. And now, little, stabbing blades of cold were beginning to pierce his heart.

But likely he would go to sleep before they really began to trouble him. The northern night deepened around him. The wind sprang up and moved softly over the pale ice above him. The day was done.

XXV

Bess had made good time along her line that day. She had not forgotten that this was the day of her rendezvous with Ned, and by walking swiftly, eschewing even short rests, carrying her larger trophies into the cabin to skin rather than halting and thawing them out over a fire, she arrived at the Forks hut at midafternoon. She began at once to make preparations for Ned’s coming.

She built a roaring fire in the little, rusted stove, knowing well the blessing it would be to the tired trapper, coming in with his load of furs. She started supper so that the hot meal would be ready upon his arrival. Then she began to watch the hillside for his coming.

It always gave her a pleasant glow to see the little, moving spot of black at the edge of the timber. Because of a vague depression that she had been unable all day to shake off, she anticipated it especially now. They always had such cheery times together, perched on opposite sides of the little stove. To Bess they redeemed the whole, weary week of toil. It was true that their relations were of companionship only; but this was dear enough. If, long ago, her dreams had gone out to him with deeper meaning, surely she had conquered them by now,—never to set her heart leaping at a friendly word, never to carry her, at the edge of slumber, into a warm, beloved realm of exquisite fancy. Bess had undergone training too. These days in the snow had strengthened her and steeled her to face the truth; and even, in a measure, to reconcile herself to the truth. She had tried to make her heart content with what she had, and surely she was beginning to succeed.

Ned was a little past his usual time to-night. Her depression deepened, and she couldn’t fight it off. This North was so remorseless and so cruel, laying so many pitfalls for the unsuspecting. It was strange what blind terror swept through her at just the thought of disaster befalling Ned. It made her doubt herself, her own mastery of her heart. She never considered the dangers that lay in her own path, only those in his. At the end of a miserable hour she straightened, scarcely able to believe her eyes.

On the glare ice of the glacier, a mile straight up the ridge from the cabin, she saw the figure of a man. Far as it was, one glance told her it was not merely a creature of the wild, a bear disturbed in his winter sleep or a caribou standing facing her. It was Ned, of course, taking the perilous path over the ice, instead of keeping to the blazed trail of his trap line. On the slight downward slope toward her, clearly outlined against the white ice, she could see every step he took.

He was walking boldly over the glassy surface. Didn’t he know its terrors, the danger of slipping on the icy shelves and falling to his death, the deep crevices shunned by the wild creatures? She watched every step with anxious gaze. When he was almost to safety she saw him stop, draw back a few paces, and then come forward at a leaping pace.

What happened thereafter came too fast for her eyes to follow. One instant she saw his form distinctly as he ran. The next, and the ice lay white and bare in the wan light, and Ned had disappeared as if by a magician’s magic.

For one moment she gazed in growing horror. There was no ice promontory behind which he was hidden, nor did he reappear again. And peering closely, she made out a faint, dark line, like a pencil mark on the ice, just where Ned had disappeared.

The truth went home in a flash. The dark line indicated a crevice, to the bottom of which no living thing may fall and live. Yet to such little wild creatures, red-eyed ermine and his fellows that might have been watching her from the snow in front, Bess gave no outward sign that she had seen or that she understood.

She stood almost motionless at first. Her eyes were toneless, lightless holes in her white face; the face itself seemed utterly blank. She seemed to be drawing within herself, into an eerie dream world of her own, as if seeking shelter from some dire, unthinkable thing that lay without. She was hardly conscious, as far as the usual outward consciousness is concerned; unaware of herself, unaware of the snow fields about her and the deepening cold; unaware of the onward march of time. She seemed like a child, hovering between life and death in the scourge of some dread, childhood malady.

Slowly her lips drew in a smile; a smile ineffably sweet, tender as the watch of angels. It was as if the dying child had smiled to reassure its sobbing mother, to tell her that all was well, that she must dry her tears. “It isn’t true,” she whispered, there in the stillness. “It couldn’t be true—not to Ned. There is some way out—some mistake.”

She turned into the cabin, bent, and added fresh fuel to the stove. Its heat scorched her face, and she put up her hand to shield it. The cabin should be warm, when she brought Ned home. She mustn’t let the cold creep in. She must not forget the _cold_, always watching for every little opening. Perhaps he would want food too: she glanced into the iron pot on the stove. Then, acting more by instinct than by conscious thought, she began to look about for such tools as she would need in the work to follow.

There was a piece of rope, used once on a hand sled, hanging on the wall; but it was only about eight feet in length. Surely it was not long enough to aid her, yet it was all she had. Next, she removed a blanket from her cot and threw it over her shoulder. There might be need of this too,—further protection against the cold.

Heretofore she had moved slowly, hardly aware of her own acts; but now she was beginning to master herself again. She mustn’t linger here. She must make her spirit waken to life, her muscles spring to action. Carrying her rope and her blanket, she went out the door, closed it behind her, and started up toward the glacier.

Only one thing was real in that long mile; and all things else were vague and shadowy as faces in a remembered dream. The one reality was the dark line, ever broader and more distinct, that lay across the ice where Ned had disappeared. The hope she had clung to all the way, that it was merely a shallow hollow in the ice and not one of the dread crevices that seem to go to the bowels of the earth, was evidently without the foundation of fact.

Weary lifetimes passed away before ever she reached the first, steep cliff of the glacier. She had to follow along its base, on to the high ground toward which Ned had been heading, finally crossing back to the smooth table of the glacier itself. There was no chance for a mistake now. The gash in the ice was all too plain.