Part 17

At last she stood at the very edge of the yawning seam, staring down into the unutterable blackness below. Not even _light_ could exist in the murky depths of the crevice, much less fragile human life. The day was not yet dead, twilight was still gray about her; but the crevice itself seemed full of ink clear to its mouth. And Ned’s axe, lying just at the edge of the chasm, showed where he had fallen.

There was no use of seeking farther; of calling into the lightless depths. The story was all too plain. Very quietly, she lay down on the ice, trying to peer into the blackness below; but it was with no hope of bringing the fallen back to her again. Ned was lost to her, as a falling star is lost to the star clusters in the sky.

It never occurred to her that she would ever get upon her feet again. The game had been played and lost. There was no need of braving the snow again, of fighting her way down the trap line in the bitter dawns. The star she had followed had fallen; the flame of her altar had burned out.

She knew now why she had ever fought the fight at all. It was not through any love of life, or any hope of deliverance in the end. It had all been for Ned. She had denied it before, but the truth was plain enough now. It was her love for Ned that had kept her shoulders straight under the killing labor, had sheltered her spirit from the curse of cold and storm, that had borne her aloft out of the power of this savage land to harm. She knew now why she had not given up long since.

Was that the way of woman’s heart, to sustain her through a thousand unutterable miseries only that she might be crushed in the end? Was life no more than this? She had been content to live on, to endure all, just to be near him and watch over him to the end; but there was no need of lingering now. The fire in the cabin could burn down, and the fire of her spirit could flicker out in the ever-deepening cold.

She had tried to blind herself to the truth, yet always, in the secret places of her soul, she had known. It was not that she ever had hope of Ned’s love. Lenore would get that: Ned’s devotion to her had never faltered yet. But it was enough just to be near, to work beside him, to care for him to the full limit of her mortal power. She knew now that all the tears she had shed had been for him: not for the lash of cold on her own body, but on his; not for her own miseries, but those that had so often brought Ned clear into the shadow of death. And now the final blow had fallen. She could lie still on the ice and let the wind cry by in triumph above her.

She had loved every little moment with him, on the nights of their rendezvous. She had loved him even at first, before ever his manhood came upon him, but her love had been an infinite, an ineffable thing in these last few weeks of his greatness. She had watched his slow growth; every one of his victories had been a victory to her; and she had loved every fresh manifestation of his new strength. But oh, she had loved his boyishness too. His queer, crooked smile, his brown hair curling over his brow, his laugh and his eyes,—all had moved her and glorified her beyond any power of hers to tell.

She called his name into the chasm depths, and some measure of self-control returned to her when she heard the weird, rolling echo. Perhaps she shouldn’t give up yet. It wouldn’t be Ned’s way to yield to despair until the last, faint flame of hope had burned out. Perhaps the crevice was not of such vast depth as she had been taught to believe. Perhaps even now the man she loved was lying, shattered but not dead, only a few feet below her in the darkness. She had come swiftly; perhaps the deadly cold had not yet had time to claim him. She called again, loudly as she could.

And that cry did not go unheard. Ned had given up but a few moments before Bess had come, and her full voice carried clearly into the strange, misty realm of semi-consciousness into which he had drifted. And this manhood that had lately grown upon him would not let him shut his ears to this sobbing appeal. His own voice, sounding weird and hollow as the voice of the dead in that immeasurable abyss, came back in answer.

“Here I am, Bess,” he said. “You’ll have to work quick.”

XXVI

It was bitter hard for Ned to fight his way back through death’s twilight. The cold had hold of him, its triumph was near, and it would not let him go without a savage battle that seemed to wrack the man in twain. So far as his own wishes went, he only wanted to drift on, farther and farther into the twilight ocean, and never return to the cursed island again. But Bess was calling him, and he couldn’t deny her. Perhaps in a distant cabin Lenore called him too.

Indeed, the call upon him was more urgent than ever before. Before, his thought had always been for Lenore, but Bess too was a factor now. In that utter darkness Ned saw more clearly than ever before in his life, and while his eyes searched only for Lenore, he kept seeing Bess too. Bess with her never-failing smile of encouragement, her soft beauty that had held him, in spite of himself, on their nights at Forks cabin. Her need of him was real, threatened by Doomsdorf as she was, and he mustn’t leave her sobbing so forlornly on the ice above. Lenore was first, of course,—his duty to her reason enough for making a mighty fight. But Bess’s pleading moved him deeply.

He summoned every ounce of courage and determination that he had and tried to shake the frost from his brain. “You’ll have to work quick,” he warned again. His voice was stronger now, but softened with a tenderness beyond her most reckless dreams. “Don’t be too hopeful—I haven’t much left in me. What can you do?”

The girl who answered him was in no way the lost and hopeless mortal that had lain sobbing on the ice. Her scattered, weakened faculties had swept back to her in all their strength, at the first sound of his voice. _He was alive_, and it is the code of the North, learned in these dreadful months, that so long as a spark still glows the battle must not be given over. There was something to fight for now. The fighting side of her that Ned had seen so often swept swiftly into dominance. At once she was a cold blade, true and sure; brain and body in perfect discipline.

“How far are you?” she asked. “I can’t see——”

“About ten feet—but I can’t get up without help.”

“Can you stand up?”

“Yes.” Forcing himself to the last ounce of his nerve and courage, he drew himself erect. Reaching upward, his hands were less than a yard from the top of the crevice.

Bess did not make the mistake of trying to reach down to him. She conquered the impulse at once, realizing that any weight at all, unsupported as she was, would draw her into the ravine. Even the rope would be of no use until she had something firm to which to attach it.

“I’ve dug holes most of the way up,” he told her. “I might try to climb ’em, with a little help——”

“Are you at the bottom of the crevice?”

“The bottom is hundreds of feet below me. I’m on a ledge about three feet wide.”

“Then stand still till I can really help you. I can’t pull you now without being pulled in myself, and if you’d fall back you’d probably roll off the ledge. The ice is like glass. Ned, are you good for ten minutes more——”

“I don’t know——”

“It’s the only chance.” Again her tone was pleading. “Keep the blood moving for ten minutes more, Ned. Oh, tell me you’ll try——”

Deep in the gloom she thought she heard him laugh—only a few, little syllables, wan and strange in the silence—and it was all the answer she needed. He would fight on for ten minutes more. He would struggle against the cold until she could rescue him.

“Here’s a blanket,” she told him swiftly. “Put it around you, if you can, without danger of rolling off.”

She dropped him the great covering she had brought; then in a single, deerlike motion, she leaped the narrow crevice. On the opposite side she procured Ned’s axe; then she turned, and half running, half gliding on the ice, sped toward the nearest timber,—a number of stunted spruce two hundred yards distant at the far edge of the glacier.

Bess had need of her woodsman’s knowledge now. Never before had her blows been so true, so telling on the tough wood. Before, in the fuel cutting of months before, she had wielded the axe in fear of the lash, but to-day she worked for Ned’s life, for the one dream that mattered yet. Almost at once she had done her work and was started back with a tough pole, eight feet long and four inches in diameter, balanced on her sturdy shoulder.

Ned was still strong enough to answer her call when she returned, and the dim light still permitted him to see her lay the pole she had cut as a bridge across the crevice, cutting notches in the ice to hold it firm. Swiftly she tied one end of her rope to the pole and dropped the other to him.

“Can you climb up?” she asked him. Everything had centered down to this—whether he still had strength to climb the rope.

“Just watch me,” was the answer.

From that instant, she knew that she had won. The spirit behind his words would never falter, with victory so near. He dug his moccasins into the holes he had hacked in the ice, meanwhile working upward, hand over hand. To fall meant to die,—but Ned didn’t fall.

It was a hard fight, weakened as he was, but soon the girl’s reaching hands caught his sleeve, then his coat; finally they were fastened firmly, lifting with all the girl’s strength, under the great arms. His hand seized the pole, and he gave a great upward lunge. And then he was lying on the ice beside her, fighting for breath, not daring to believe that he was safe.

But the usual cool, half-mirthful remark that, in many little crises, Ned had learned to expect from Bess was not forthcoming to-night. Nor were the sounds in the twilight merely those of heavy breathing. The strain was over, and Bess had given way to the urge of her heart at last. Her tears flowed unchecked, whether of sorrow or happiness even she did not know.

The man crawled toward her, moved by an urge beyond him, and for a single moment his strong arms pressed her close. “Don’t cry, little pal,” he told her. He smiled, a strangely boyish, happy smile, into her eyes. Very softly, reverently he kissed her wet eyelids, then stilled her trembling lips with his own. He smiled again, a great good-humor taking hold of him. “You’re too big a girl to cry!”

It was he, to-night, who had to relieve with humor a situation that would have soon been out of bounds. Yet all at once he saw that the little sentence had meaning far beyond what he had intended. She _had_ shown bigness to-night,—a greatness of spirit and strength that left him wondering and reverent. The battle she had fought to save his life was no less than his own waged with the white wolf, weeks before.

Here was another who had stood the gaff! She too knew what it was to take the fighting chance. Presently he knew, by light of this adventure on the ice, that Bess was more than mere companion in toil and hardship, some one to shelter and protect. She was a _comrade-at-arms_,—such a fortress of strength as the best of women have always been to the men they loved.

He did not know whether or not she loved him. It didn’t affect the point that, in a crisis, she had shown the temper of her steel! He did not stand alone henceforth. In the struggle for freedom that was to come here was an ally on whom, to the very gates of death, he could implicitly rely.

XXVII

When food and warmth had brought complete recovery, Ned took up with Bess the problem of deliverance from the island. He found that for weeks she had been thinking along the same line, and like him, she had as yet failed to hit upon any plan that offered the least chance for success. The subject held them late into the night.

There was no need of a formal pact between them. Each of them realized that if ever the matter came to the crisis, the other could be relied upon to the last ditch. They stood together on that. Whatever the one attempted, the other would carry through. And because of their mutual trust, both felt more certain than ever of their ultimate triumph.

They took different trails in the dawn, following the long circle of their trap lines. All the way they pondered on this same problem, conceiving a plan only to reject it because of some unsurmountable obstacle to its success; dwelling upon the project every hour and dreaming about it at night. But Ned was far as ever from a conclusion when, three days later, he followed the beach on the way to the home cabin.

He had watched with deadened interest the drama of the wild things about him these last days; but when he was less than a mile from home he had cause to remember it again. To his great amazement he found at the edge of the ice the fresh track of one of the large island bears.

There was nothing to tell for sure what had awakened the great creature prematurely from its winter sleep. The expected date of awakening was still many weeks off. But the grizzly is notoriously irregular in his habits; and experienced naturalists have long since ceased to be surprised at whatever he may do. Ned reasoned at once that the present mild weather had merely beguiled the old veteran from his lair (the size of the track indicated a patriarch among the bears) and he was simply enjoying the late winter sunlight until a cold spell should drive him in again.

The sight of the great imprint was a welcome one to Ned, not alone because the wakening forecasted, perhaps, an early spring, but because he was in immediate need of bear fur. His own coat was worn; besides, he was planning a suit of cold-proof garments for Lenore, to be used perhaps in their final flight across the ice. And he saw at once that conditions were favorable for trapping the great creature.

Scarcely a quarter of a mile ahead, in a little pass that led through the shore crags down to the beach, Doomsdorf had left one of his most powerful bear traps. Ned had seen it many times as he had clambered through on a short cut to the cabin. Because it lay in a natural runway for game—one of the few spots where the shore crags could be easily surmounted—it was at least possible that the huge bear might fall into it, on his return to his lair in the hills.

Ned hurried on, and in a few moments had dug out the great trap from its covering of snow. For a moment he actually doubted his power to set it. It was of obsolete type, mighty-springed, and its jaws were of a width forbidden by all laws of trapping in civilized lands, yet Ned did not doubt its efficiency. Its mighty irons had rusted; but not even a bear’s incalculable might could shatter them.

This was not to be a bait set, so his success depended upon the skill with which he concealed the trap. First he carefully refilled the excavation he had made in digging out the trap; then he dug a shallow hole in the snow in the narrowest part of the pass. Here he set the trap, utilizing all the power of his mighty muscles, and spread a light covering of snow above.

It was a delicate piece of work. Ned had no wish for the cruel jaws to snap shut as he was working above them. But his heart was in the venture, for all his hatred of the cruelty of the device; and he covered up his tracks with veteran’s skill. Then he quietly withdrew, retracing his steps and following the shore line toward the home cabin.

Surely the mighty strength that had set the powerful spring and the skill that covered up all traces of his work could succeed at last in freeing him from slavery.

* * * * *

Bess had reached the shelter first, and she was particularly relieved to see Ned’s tall form swinging toward her along the shore. Doomsdorf was in a particularly ominous mood to-night. The curious glitter in his magnetic eyes was more pronounced than she had ever seen it,—catlike in the shadows, steely in the lantern light; and his cruel savagery was just at the surface, ready to be wakened. Worst of all, the gaze he bent toward her was especially eager to-night, horrible to her as the cold touch of a reptile.

Every time she glanced up she found him regarding her, and he followed her with his eyes when she moved. Yet she dared not seek shelter in the new cabin, for the simple reason that she was afraid Doomsdorf would follow her there. Until Ned came, her defense was solely the presence of Lenore and the squaw.

There was no particular warmth in her meeting with Ned. Doomsdorf’s eyes were still upon her, and she was careful to keep any hint of the new understanding out of her face and eyes. Ned’s weather-beaten countenance was as expressionless as Sindy’s own.

He refused to be depressed, at once, by the air of suspense and impending disaster that hung over the cabin. Thus was the day of his home-coming—looked forward to throughout the bitter days of his trap line—and was not Lenore waiting, beautiful in the lantern light, for him to speak to her? Yet the old exultation was somehow missing to-night. His thoughts kept turning back to the pact he had made with Bess—to their dream of deliverance. What was more curious, Lenore’s lack of warmth that had come to be a matter of course in their weekly meetings almost failed to hurt. His mind was so busy with the problem of their freedom that he escaped the usual despondency that had crept upon him so many times before.

It was a peculiar paradox that while this was his day of days, the one day in five that seemed to justify his continued life, it was always the most hopeless and miserable, simply because of Lenore’s attitude toward him. It wasn’t entirely her failure to respond to his own ardor. The inevitable disappointment lay as much in his own attitude toward her. It was as much the things she did as those she failed to do that depressed him; the questions she asked, her patronage of Bess, her self-pitying complaints. Always he experienced a sense of some great omission,—perhaps only his failure to feel the old delight and exultation that the mere fact of her presence used to impart to him. He found it increasingly hard to give full attention to her; to let his eyes dwell always on her beauty and his ears give heed to her wrongs.

She found him preoccupied, and as a result increased her complaints. But they left him cold to-night. Her lot was happiness itself compared to that of Bess, and yet Bess’s spirit of good sportsmanship and courage was entirely absent in her. But he must not keep comparing her with Bess. Destruction lay that way! He must continue to adore her for her beauty, the charm that used to hold him entranced.

She was all he had asked for in his old life. If they ever gained freedom, he would, in all probability, find in her all that he could desire in the future. They could take up their old love anew, and doubtless she would give him all the happiness he had a right to expect—more than he deserved. Likely enough, if the test ever came, she would show that her metal too was the finest, tempered steel! At least he could continue to believe in her until he had cause to lose faith.

And the test was not far distant now. He was not blind to the gathering storm; at any moment there might ensue a crisis that would embroil all three of them in a struggle to the death. Not one of them could escape, Lenore no more than himself or Bess. She was one of the triumvirate,—and surely she would stand with them to the last.

If the crisis could only be postponed until they had made full preparations for it! Yet in one glance, in which he traced down Doomsdorf’s fiery gaze and found it centered upon Bess, he knew that any instant might bring the storm!

He felt his own anger rising. A dark fury, scarcely controllable, swept over him at the insult of that creeping, serpent gaze upon Bess’s beauty. But he mustn’t give way to it yet. He must hold himself for the last, dread instant of need.

The four of them gathered about the little, rough table, and again the squaw served them, from the shadows. It was a strange picture, there in the lantern light,—the imperturbable face of the squaw, always half in shadow; the lurid wild-beast eyes of Doomsdorf gleaming under his shaggy brows; Lenore’s beauty a thing to hold the eyes; and Bess horrified and fearful at what the next moment might bring. Hardly a word was exchanged from the meal’s beginning to its end. Bess tried to talk, so as to divert Doomsdorf’s sinister thoughts, but the words would not come to her lips. The man seemed eager to finish the meal.

As soon as they had moved from the table toward the little stove, and the squaw had begun the work of clearing away the dishes, Doomsdorf halted at Bess’s side. For a moment he gazed down at her, a great hand resting on her chair.

“You’re a pretty little hell-cat,” he told her, in curiously muffled tones. “What makes you such a fighter?”

She tried to meet his eyes. “I have to be, in this climate,” she answered. “Where would you get your furs——”

He uttered one great hoarse syllable, as if in the beginning of laughter. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it. You’d sooner walk ten miles through the snow than give an inch, wouldn’t you?” His hand reached, closing gently upon her arm, and a shiver of repulsion passed over her. “That’s a fine little muscle—but you don’t want to work it off. Why don’t you show a little friendship?”

The girl looked with difficulty into his great, drawn face. Ned stiffened, wondering if the moment of crisis were at hand at last. Lenore watched appalled, but the native went on about her tasks as if she hadn’t heard.

“You can’t expect—much friendship—from a prisoner,” Bess told him brokenly. Her face, so white in the yellow lantern light, her trembling lips, most of all the appeal for mercy in her child’s eyes—raised to this beast compared with whom even the North was merciful—wakened surging, desperate anger in Ned. The room turned red before his eyes, his muscles quivered, and he was rapidly reaching that point wherein his self-control, on which life itself depended, was jeopardized. Yet he must hold himself with an iron hand. He must wait to the last instant of need. Everything depended on that, in avoiding the crisis until he had made some measure of preparation.

The loss of his long-bladed skinning knife increased the odds against him. He had put considerable reliance in its hair-splitting blade; and since he had perfected the sheath of caribou leather whereby he could keep it open in his pocket, he had hoped that it might be the means of freedom. In the three days since its loss he had been obliged to carry one of the butcher knives from the supplies at Forks cabin,—a sharp enough implement, but without the dagger point that would be so deadly in close work. However, he moved his arm so that he could reach the hilt of the knife in one motion.

But with the uncanny watchfulness of a cat Doomsdorf saw the movement. For one breath Ned’s life was suspended by a hair: Doomsdorf’s first impulse was to seize his pistol and bore the younger man through and through with lead. It was a mere madman’s whim that he refrained: he had a more entertaining fate in store for Ned when affairs finally reached a crisis. He leered down in contempt.

“Your little friend seems to be getting nervous,” he remarked easily to Bess. “So not to disturb him further, let’s you and I go to the new cabin. I’ve taken some fine pelts lately—I want you to see them. You need a new coat.”