Chapter 19

Virginia's pistol was in Joe's hand by now, and he shot in Bill's direction. Two spurts of yellow fire broke for an instant the utter gloom. But there was no time for a third shot. He was the nearest of the three attackers, and Bill's outstretched arms seized him. The woodsman's muscles gave a mighty wrench.

His grasp was about Joe's chest at first, but with a great lurch he slung the man's body out far enough so that he could loop his sinewy arms about the man's knees. Joe was shifted in his arms as workmen are sometimes snatched up by a mighty belt in a machine shop; he seemed simply to snap in the remorseless grasp. Bill himself had no sensation of his enemy's weight. He had him about the knees by now, Joe's body thrust out almost straight from centrifugal force, and with a terrific wrench of his mighty shoulders Bill hurled him against the wall.

It was well for his enemies that none of them were in the road of that human missile. They would have taken no further part in the ensuing battle. Joe's body crushed against the logs with a sound that was strange and horrible in the utter darkness; the pistol spun from his hand and rattled down'; then he fell with a crash to the floor. There was no further movement from him thereafter. His neck had been broken like a match. The odds were but two to one.

Harold had taken out his own revolver now and was shooting blindly in the darkness. Ducking low, Bill leaped for him. In that leap there was none of the gentle mercy with which he had dealt with him first, so long ago in Harold's cabin. But a quick movement by Harold saved him from the full force of the leap; in a moment they were grappling in each other's arms.

Bill wrenched him back and forth, and in an instant would have crushed the life out of him if it hadn't been for the interference of Pete. The latter breed leaped on his back, and Bill had to neglect Harold an instant to stretch up his arms and hurl Pete to the floor. Harold still clung to him, trying to seize his throat, but Bill wrenched him down. He flung his own body down on top of him, then seized him by the throat with the deadly intention of hammering his head on the floor; but before he could accomplish his purpose Pete was upon him again.

It was the end of the preliminaries. In that second the fight began in earnest. They were both powerful men, the breed and Harold; and Bill was like a wild beast--quick as a cougar, resistless as a grizzly--a fighting fury that in the darkness was terrible as death. Mighty muscles, stinging blows, striking fists and grasping arms; the rage and glory of battle was upon him as never before.

It was the death fight--in the darkness--and that meant it was a savage, nightmare thing that called forth those most deep and terrible instincts that in the first days of the earth were stored and implanted in the germ plasm. These were no longer men of the twentieth century. They were simply beasts, fighting to the death in a cave. It was a familiar thing to be warring thus in the darkness: Neither Harold nor Pete missed the light now. They were carried back to no less furious battles, fought in dark caverns under the sea; murder flamed in their hearts and fire ran riot in their blood.

They were no longer conscious of time; already it was as if they had struggled thus through the long roll of the centuries. It was hard to remember what had been the cause of the fight. It didn't matter now, anyway; the only issue left was the life of their adversary. To kill, to tear their enemies' hearts from their warm breasts and their arteries from their throats,--this was all that any of the three could remember now. It was true that Bill kept his adversaries away from Virginia's corner as well as he could, but he did it by instinct rather than by conscious planning. He had not hated Harold in these months past, but had only regarded him with contempt; but hate came to him fast enough in those first moments of battle.

Once, reeling across the cabin, they encountered soft flesh that tried to escape from beneath their feet; at first Bill thought it was Joe, returned to consciousness. But in an instant he knew the truth. "Go back to your corner. Virginia," he commanded.

For some reason that he could not guess, she had seen fit to crawl forth from her shelter; whether or not she returned to it he couldn't tell. There was no chance to warn her again. His foes were upon him.

This was not a silent fight, at first. So that they would not attack each other, Harold and Pete cried out often, to reveal their location and to signal a combined attack against Bill. In the instants that he was free from Bill's arms and he knew that his confederate was out of range, Harold fired blindly with his pistol. Their bodies crashed against the wall, broke the furniture into kindling at their feet; they snarled their hatred and their curses.

Bill fought like a giant, a might of battle upon him never known before. He would hurl away one, then whirl to face the other; his fists would lash out, his mighty shoulders would wrench. More than once their combined attack hurled him to the floor, but always he was able to regain his feet. Once he seized Harold's wrist, and twisting it back forced him to drop the pistol. But Pete's interference prevented him from breaking his arm.

Steadily Harold and Pete were learning to work together. They were used to the darkness now; Pete obeyed the white man's shouts. Two against one was never a fair fight, and they knew that by concerted action they could break him down.

One lucky blow sent Pete spinning to the floor, and Bill's strong arms hurled Harold after him. Just for a fraction of an instant he stood braced and alone in the center of the cabin. For the instant a silence, deep and appalling past all words, fell over the room. But Harold's voice quickly shattered it.

"Up and at him Pete!" he cried, hoarse with fury. They both sprang upon him again.

Both were fortunate in securing good holds, and as they came from opposite sides, Bill found it impossible to hurl them off. Both of his foes recognized their great chance; if they could retain their hold only for a moment they could break him and beat him down. Harold also knew that this was the moment of crisis. All three contestants seemed to sweep to the fray with added fury. Bill was drawing on his reserve strength--the battle could only last a few minutes longer.

They fought in silence now. They did not waste precious breath on shouts or curses. There were no pistol shots, no warnings; only the sound of troubled breathing against the shock of their bodies as they reeled against the walls. Bill was fighting with all his might to keep his feet.

But the tower that was his body fell at last. All three staggered, reeled, then crashed to the floor. Pete had managed to wiggle from underneath and, his hold yet unbroken, struggled at Bill's left side; Harold was on top. But for all that he lay prone, Bill was not conquered yet. With his flailing arms he knocked aside the vicious blows that Harold aimed at his face; he tore Pete's grasp from his throat. He fought with a final, incredible might. And now he was breaking their holds to climb once more upon his feet.

Then--above the sound of their writhing bodies--Virginia heard Pete exclaim. It was a savage, a murderous sound, and anew degree of terror swept through her. But she didn't cry out. She had her own plans.

"Hold him--just one instant!" Pete cried. The breed had remembered his knife. It was curious that he hadn't thought of it before.

He took it rather carefully from his holster. The two men were threshing on the floor by now, Harold in a desperate effort to keep his enemy down, and there was plenty of time. Pete's hand fumbled in his pocket. In his cunning and his savagery he realized that the supreme opportunity for victory was at hand; but he must take infinite pains.

He didn't want to run the risk of slaying his own confederate. His hand found a match; he raised his knife high. The match cracked, then flamed in the darkness.

But it was not to be that that murderous blow should go home. He had forgotten Bill's lone ally,--the girl that had seemed so crushed and helpless a few minutes before. She had not remained in the safe corner where Bill had thrust her, and she had had good reasons. The price that she paid was high, but it didn't matter now. She had crawled out to find her pistol that Joe's hand had let fall, and just before Pete had lighted his match her hand had encountered it on the floor.

It seemed to leap in her hand as the match flamed. It described a blue arc; then rested, utterly motionless, for a fraction of an instant. For that same little time all her nervous forces rallied to her aid; her eyes were remorseless and true over the sights.

The pistol shot rang in the silence. The knife dropped from Pete's hand. She had shot with amazing accuracy, straight for the little hollow in his back that his raised arm had made. He turned with a look of ghastly surprise.

Then he went on his face, creeping like a legless thing toward the door. With a mighty effort Bill rolled Harold beneath him.

The battle was short thereafter. Harold had never been a match for Bill, unaided. The latter's hard fists lashed into his face, blow after blow with grim reports in the silence. Harold's resistance ceased; his body quivered and lay still. Remembering Virginia Bill leaped to his feet.

But Harold was not quite unconscious. But one impulse was left,--to escape; and dumbly he crawled to the door. Pete had managed to open it; but he crawled past Pete's body, strangely huddled and still, just beyond the threshold. Then he paused in the snow for a last, savage expression of his hate.

But it was just words. No weapon remained in his hands. "I'll get you yet, you devil!" he screamed, almost incoherently. "I'll lay in wait and kill you--you can't get away! The wolves have got your grizzly meat--you can't go without food."

His voice was shrill and terrible in the silence of the winter night. Even in the stress and inward tumult that was the reaction of the battle, Bill could not help but hear. He didn't doubt that the words were true: he realized in an instant what the loss of the grizzly flesh would mean. But his only wish was that he had killed the man when he had him helpless in his hands.

He remembered Joe then, and listened for any sound from him. He heard none, and like a man in a dream he felt his way to the lifeless form beside the wall. He seized the shoulders of the breed's coat, dragged him like a sack of straw, and as easily hurled his body through the doorway into the drifts. Two bodies lay there now. But only the coyotes, seekers of the dead, had interest in them.

He turned, then stood swaying slightly, in the doorway. No wind stirred over the desolate wastes without. The cabin was ominously silent. He could hear his own troubled breathing; but where there was no stir, no murmur from the corner where he had left Virginia. A ghastly terror, unknown in the whole stress of the battle, swept over him.

"Virginia," he called. "Where are you?"

From the dark, far end of the cabin he heard the answer,--a voice low and tremulous such as sometimes heard from the lips of a sick child. "Here I am, Bill," she replied. "I'm hit with a stray shot--and I believe--they've killed me."

XXXII

Was this their destiny,--utter and hopeless defeat in the moment of victory? Was this the way of justice that, after all they had endured, they should yet go down to death? They had fought a mighty fight, they had waged a cruel war against cold and hardship, they had known the full terror and punishment of the snow wastes in their dreadful adventure of the past two days; and had it all come to nothing, after all? Was life no more than this,--a cruel master that tortured his slaves only to give them death? These thoughts brought their full bitterness in the instant that Bill groped his way to Virginia's side.

His hands told him she was lying huddled against the wall, a slight, pathetic figure that broke the heart within the man. "Here I am," she said again, her voice not racked with pain but only soft and tender. He knelt beside her, then groped for a match. But whether the injury was small or great he felt that the issue would be the same.

But before he struck the match he remembered his foe without; he would be quick to fire through the window if a light showed him his target. Even now he might be crouched in the snow, his rifle in his arms, waiting for just this chance. Bill snatched a blanket from the cot, shielded them with it, and lighted the match behind it. "He can't see the light through this," he told her. "If he does--I guess it doesn't much matter."

He groped for the fallen candle, lighted it, and held it close. "You'll have to look and see yourself, Virginia," he told her. "You remember--of course----"

Yes, she remembered his blindness. She looked down at the little stain of red on her left shoulder. "I can't tell," she told him. "It went in right here--give me your hand."

She took his warm hand and rested it against the wound. Someway, it comforted her. "Close to the top of the shoulder, then," he commented. Then he groped till his sensitive fingers told him he had found the egress of the bullet--on her arm just down from her shoulder. "But there's nothing I can do--it's not a wound I can dress. It's cleaner now than anything we've got to clean it with. The only thing is to lie still--so it won't bleed."

"Do you think I'll die?" she asked him quietly. There was no fear--only sorrow--in her tones. "Tell me frankly, Bill."

"I don't think the wound is serious in itself--if we could get you down to a doctor," he told her. "It isn't bleeding much now, because you are lying still, but it has been bleeding pretty freely. It's just a flesh wound, really. But you see----"

Her mind leaped at once to his thought. "You mean--it's the same, either way?" she questioned.

"It doesn't make much difference." The man spoke quietly, just as she might have expected him to speak in such a moment as this. "Oh, Virginia--we've fought so hard--it's bitter to lose now. You see, don't you--you couldn't walk with that wound--you don't know the way, so I could walk and pull you on the sled--and Harold is gone. He won't show us the way or help us now. We haven't any food here--the grizzly has been eaten by wolves. One of us blind and one of us wounded--you see--what chance we've got against the North. If we had the grizzly flesh, we could stay here till my sight returned--and still, perhaps, get you out in time to save you from the injury. If you knew the way to the settlements, I might haul you on the sled--you guiding me--and take a chance of running into some meat on the way down. But none of those things are true."

"Then what"--the girl spoke breathlessly--"does it mean?"

"It means death--that's all it means." There was no sentimentality, no tremor in his voice now. He was looking his fate in the face; he knew he could not spare the girl by keeping the truth from her. "Death as sure as we're here--from hunger and your wound--if Harold or the cold doesn't get us first. We've been cheated, Virginia. We've played with a crooked dealer. I don't care on my own account----"

"Then don't care on mine, either." All at once her hand went up and caressed his face. "Hold me, Bill, won't you?" she asked. "Hold me in your arms."

She asked it simply, like a little child. He shifted his position, then lifted her so that her breast was against his, his arms around her, her soft hair against his shoulder. The candle, dropped from his hand, was extinguished. The cold deepened outside the cabin. The white, icy moon rode in the sky.

The man's arms tightened around her. He lowered his lips close to hers. There in the shadow of death her breast pressed to his, the locks of iron that held his heart's secret were shattered, the veil of his temple was rent. "Virginia," he asked his voice throbbing, "do you want me to tell you something--the truest thing in all my life? I thought I could keep it from you, but I can't. I can't keep it any more----"

Her arm went up and encircled his neck, and she drew his head down to hers. "Yes, Bill," she told him, "I want you to tell me. I think I know what it is."

"I love you. That's it; it never was and it never can be anything else." The words, long pent-up, poured from his lips in a flood. "Virginia, I love you, love you, love you--my little girl, my little, little girl----"

She drew his head down and down until her own lips halted the flow of his words. "And I love you, Bill," she told him. "No one but you."

All the sweetness and tenderness of her glorious and newly wakened love was in the kiss that she gave him. Yet the man could not believe. The human soul, condemned to darkness, can never believe at first when the light breaks through. His heart seemed to halt in his breast in this instant of infinite suspense.

"You do?" he whispered at last, in inexpressible wonder. "Did you say that you loved _me_--you so beautiful, so glorious--Don't tell me that in pity----"

"I love you, Bill," she told him earnestly, then laughed softly at his disbelief. She kissed him again and again, softly as moonlight falls upon meadows. The man's heart leaped and flooded, but no more words would come to his lips. He could only sit with his strong arms ever holding her closer to his breast, kissing the lips that responded so tenderly and lingeringly, swept with a rapture undreamed of before. Ever her soft, warm arm held his lips to hers, as if she could not let him go.

The seconds, thrilled with a wonder ineffable, passed into minutes. Virginia had no sensation of pain from her wound. The fear of death oppressed her no more. She knew that she had come to her appointed place at last, a haven and shelter no less than that to which the white ship comes in from the tempestuous sea. This was her fate,--happiness and peace at last in her woodsman's arms.

* * * * *

They were no different from other lovers such as cling and kiss in the glory of a summer moon, in gardens far away. Their vows were the same, the mystery and the wonder no less. The savage realm into which they were cast could not oppress them now. They forgot the drifts unending, the winter forests stretching interminably from range to range about them, the pitiless cold, ever waiting just without the cabin door. Even impending death itself, in the glory of this night, could cast no shadow upon their spirit.

In the moment of their victory the North had defeated them, but in the instant of defeat they had found infinite and eternal victory. No blow that life could deal, no weapon that this North should wield against them, could crush them now. They were borne high above the reach of these. They had discovered the great Secret, the eternal Talisman against which no curse can blast or no disaster break the spirit.

They had their secret, whispered exultations, like all lovers the length and breadth of the world. Virginia told him that in her own heart she had loved him almost from the first day but how she had not realized it, in all its completeness, until now. Bill told her of the wakening of his own love, and how he had confessed it to himself the night they had played "Souvenir" in the complaint of the wind.

He tried to explain to her his doubts and fears,--how he had looked at her as a being from another world. "I could imagine my loving you, from the first," he told her, "but never you giving your love to me."

"And who is more worthy of it--of anybody's love--than you?" she replied, utilizing a sweetheart's way, much more effective than words, to stop his lips. Then she told him of his bravery, his tenderness and steadfastness; how there was no feeling of descent in giving her love to him. She told him that in fact his education was as good as hers if not superior, that his natural breeding and gentleness were the equal of that of any man that moved in her own circle. She could find protection and shelter in his strong arms, and in these months in the North she had learned that this was the most important thing of all. He could provide for her, too, with the wealth of his mine,--a point not to be forgotten. Her standards were true and sensible, she was down to the simple, primitive basis of things, and she did not forget that provision for his wife was man's first responsibility and the first duty of love.

Only once did Bill leave her,--to cover the crack of the door and build up the fire. When he returned, her warm little flood of kisses was as if he had been absent for weary hours.

But her thoughts had been busy, even in this moment. All at once she drew his ear close to her lips.

"Bill, will you listen to me a minute?" she asked.

"Listen! I'll listen to every word----"

"Some way--I've taken fresh heart since we--since we found out we loved each other. It seems to me that this love wasn't given to us, only to have us die in a few days--from this awful wound and you from hunger. We're only three days' journey--and there must be some way out."

"God knows I wish you could find one. But I can't see--and you don't know the way--and we have no food."

"But listen--this wound isn't very bad. I know I can't walk--it will start bleeding if I do--but if I can get any attention at all soon, I know it won't be serious. Bill, have you found out--you can trust me, in a pinch?"

Remembering that instant when the match had flared and her pistol had shot so remorselessly and so true, he didn't hesitate over his answer. "Sweetheart, I'd trust you to the last second."

"Then trust me now. Listen to every word I say and do what I tell you. I think I know the way--at least a fighting chance--to life and safety."

XXXIII

Whispering eagerly, Virginia told Bill the plan that would give them their fighting chance. His mind, working clear and true, absorbed every detail. "It depends first," she said, "whether or not you can crawl through the little window of the cabin."

Bill remembered his experience in the smoke-filled hut and he kissed her, smiling. "I've got into smaller places than that, in my time," he told her. "I can take the little window right out. I put it in myself."

They were not so awed by their dilemma that they couldn't have gay words. "You got into my heart, too, Bill--a great dealer smaller place than the window," she whispered. "The next thing--are Harold's snowshoes in this room?"

"So it depends on Harold, does it? I believe his snowshoes are here. Harold left rather hurriedly--and I don't think he took them."

"What everything depends on--is getting out. Getting out quickly. The longer we stay here, without food, the more certain death is. I know I can't walk and you can't see. We have no food--except enough for one meal, perhaps--but we've got to take a chance on that. Bill, Harold is waiting, right now--probably in the little cabin where he sleeps--for a chance to get those shoes. He's helpless without them. When he gets them, he can go to the Yuga--enlist more of his breed friends--and wait in ambush for us, just as he said. He's hoping we've forgotten about them. I am sure he didn't take the shoes. They were behind the stove last night."

To make sure, Bill groped his way across the cabin and found not only Harold's shoes, but his own and Virginia's, bringing them all back to her side.

"What's now, Little Corporal?" he asked.