"To bring out the doctor."
Allonby raised his head and looked at him curiously. "Are you sure that, with six or eight feet of snow on the divide, you could ever get there?"
"Well," said Brooke, cheerfully, "I believe I could, and, if I don"t, you will be very little worse off than you were before. You see, the provisions will not last two of us more than a few days longer, and you can take it that I will do all I can to get through the snow. Since you are not the only man who is anxious to find the silver, your health is a matter of importance to everybody just now."
Allonby smiled curiously. "We will consider that the reason, and it is a tolerably good one, or I would not let you go. Still, I fancy you have another, and it is appreciated. There is, however, something more to be said. You will find my working plans in the case yonder should anything unexpected happen before you come back. Life, you know, is always a trifle uncertain."
"That," said Brooke, decisively, "is morbid nonsense. You will be down the mine again in a week after the doctor comes."
"Well," said Allonby, with a curious quietness, "I should, at least, very much like to find the silver."
Brooke changed the subject somewhat abruptly, and it was an hour later when he shook hands with his comrade and went out into the bitter night with two blankets strapped upon his shoulders. Their parting was not demonstrative, though they realized that the grim spectre with the scythe would stalk close behind each of them until they met again, and Brooke, turning on the threshold, saw Allonby following him with comprehending eyes. Then he suddenly pulled the door to, shutting out the lamplight and the alluring red glow of the stove, and swung forward, knee-deep in dusty snow, into the gloom of the pines. The silence of the great white land was overwhelming, and the frost struck through him.
It was late on the third night when he floundered into a little sleeping settlement, and leaned gasping against the door of the doctor"s house before he endeavored to rouse its occupant. The latter stared at him almost aghast when he opened it, lamp in hand, and Brooke reeled, grey in the face with weariness and sheeted white with frozen snow, into the light.
"Steady!" he said, slipping his arm through Brooke"s. "Come in here.
Now, keep back from the stove. I"ll get you something that will fix you up in a minute. You came in from the Dayspring--over the divide? I heard the freighter telling the boys it couldn"t be done."
Brooke laughed harshly. "Well," he said, "you see me here, and, if that"s not sufficient, you"re going to prove the range can be crossed yourself to-morrow."
The doctor was new to that country, and he was very young, or he would, in all probability, not been there at all, but when he heard Brooke"s story he nodded tranquilly. "I"m afraid I haven"t done any mountaineering, but I had the long-distance snowshoe craze rather bad back in Montreal," he said. "You"re not going to give me very much of a lead over the pa.s.ses, anyway, unless you sleep the next twelve hours."
Brooke, as it happened, slept for six and then set out with the young doctor in blinding snow. He had forty to fifty pounds upon his back now, and once they left the sheltering timber it cost them four strenuous hours to make a thousand feet. Part of that night they lay awake, shivering in the pungent fir smoke in a hollow of the rocks, and started again, aching in every limb, long before the lingering dawn, while the next day pa.s.sed like a very unpleasant dream with the young doctor. The snow had ceased, and lay without cohesion, dusty and dry as flour, waist-deep where the bitter winds had whirled it in wreaths, while the glare of the white peaks became intolerable under the cloudless sun.
For hours they crawled through juniper scrub or stunted wisps of pines, where the trunks the winds had reaped lay piled upon each other in tangled confusion, with the sifting snow blown in to conceal the pitfalls between. By afternoon the doctor was flagging visibly, and white peaks and climbing timber reeled formlessly before his dazzled eyes as he struggled onward the rest of that day. Then, when the pitiless blue above them grew deeper in tint until the stars shone in depths of indigo, and the ranges fading from silver put on dim shades of blueness that enhanced their spotless purity, they stopped again, and made shift to boil the battered kettle in a gully, down which there moaned a little breeze that seared every patch of unprotected skin. The doctor collapsed behind a boulder, and lay there limply while Brooke fed the fire.
"I"m "most afraid you"ll have to fix supper yourself to-night," he said.
"Just now I don"t quite know how I"m going to start to-morrow, though it will naturally have to be done."
Brooke glanced round at the grim ramparts of ice and snow that cut sharp against the indigo. Night as it was, there was no softness in that scheme of color lighted by the frosty scintillations of the stars, and a shiver ran through his stiffened limbs.
"Yes," he said. "n.o.body not hardened to it could expect to stand more than another day in the open up here."
He got the meal ready, but very little was said during it, and for a few hours afterwards the doctor lay coughing in the smoke of the fire, while his gum-boots softened and grew hard again as he drew his feet, which pained him intolerably between whiles, a trifle further from the crackling brands. He staggered when at last Brooke, finding that shaking was unavailing, dragged him upright.
"Breakfast"s almost ready, and we have got to make the mine by to-night," he said.
The doctor could never remember how they accomplished it, but his lips were split and crusted with coagulated blood, while there seemed to be no heat left in him, when Brooke stopped on a ridge of the hillside as dusk was closing in.
"The mine is close below us. In fact, we should have seen it from where we are," he said.
Worn out as he was, the doctor noticed the grimness of his tone. "The nearer the better," he said. "I don"t quite know how I got here, but you scarcely seem at ease."
"I was wondering why Allonby, who does not like the dark, has not lighted up yet," Brooke said, drily. "We will probably find out in a few more minutes."
Then he went reeling down the descending trail, and did not stop again until he stood amidst the piles of debris and pine stumps, with the shanty looming dimly in front of him across the little clearing. It seemed very dark and still, and the doctor, who came up gasping, stopped abruptly when his comrade"s shout died away. The silence that closed in again seemed curiously eerie.
"He must have heard you at that distance," he said.
"Yes," said Brooke, a trifle hoa.r.s.ely. "If he didn"t, there"s only one thing that could have accounted for it."
Then they went on again slowly, until Brooke flung the door of the shanty open. There was no fire in the stove, and the place was very cold, while the darkness seemed oppressive.
"Strike a match--as soon as you can get it done," said the doctor.
Brooke broke several as he tore them off the block with half-frozen fingers, for the Canadian sulphur matches are not usually put up in boxes, and then a pale blue luminescence crept across the room when he held one aloft. It sputtered out, leaving a pungent odor, and thick darkness closed in again; but for a moment Brooke felt a curious relief.
"He"s not here," he said.
The doctor understood the satisfaction in his voice, for his eyes had also turned straight towards the rough wooden bunk, and he had not expected to find it empty.
"The man must have been fit to walk. Where has he gone?" he said.
Brooke fancied he knew, and, groping round the room, found and lighted a lantern. Its radiance showed that his face was grim again.
"If you can manage to drag yourself as far as the mine, I think it would be advisable," he said. "It seems to me significant that the stove is quite cold. One would fancy there had been no fire in it for several hours now."
The doctor went with him, and somehow contrived to descend the shaft.
Brooke leaned out from the ladder, swinging his lantern when they neared the bottom, and his shout rang hollowly among the rocks. There was no answer, and even the doctor, who had never seen Allonby, felt the silence that followed it.
"If the man was as ill as you fancied how could he have got down?" he said.
"I don"t know," said Brooke. "Still, I think we shall come upon him not very far away."
They went down a little further into the darkness, and then the prediction was warranted, for Brooke swung off his hat, and the doctor dropped on one knee when Allonby"s white face appeared in the moving light. He lay very still, with one arm under him, and, when a few seconds had slipped by, the doctor looked up and, meeting Brooke"s eyes, nodded.
"Yes," he said. "It must have happened at least twelve hours ago. How, I can"t tell exactly. Cardiac affection, I fancy. Anyway, not a fall.
There is something in his hand, and a bundle of papers beside him."
Brooke glanced away from the dead man, and noticed the stain of giant powder on the rock, and shattered fragments that had not been where they lay when he had last descended. Then he turned again, and took the piece of stone the doctor had, with some difficulty, dislodged from the cold fingers.
"It"s heavy," said the latter.
"Yes," said Brooke, quietly. "A considerable percentage of it is either lead or silver. You are no doubt right in your diagnosis; so far as it goes, I"m inclined to fancy I know what brought on the cardiac affection."
The doctor, who said nothing, handed him the papers, and Brooke, who opened them vacantly, started a little when he saw the jagged line, which, in drawings of the kind, usually indicates a break, was now traced across the ore vein in the plan. There was also a sc.r.a.p of paper, with his name scrawled across it, and he read, "When you have got your dollars back four or five times over, sell out your stock."
He scarcely realized its significance just then, and, moving the lantern a little, looked down on Allonby"s face again. It was very white and quiet, and the signs of indulgence had faded from it, while Brooke was sensible of a curious thrill of compa.s.sion.
"I wonder if the thing we long for most invariably comes when it is no use to us?" he said. "Well, we will go back to the shanty."
There was nothing more that any man could do for Allonby until the morrow, and the darkness once more closed in on him, while the flickering light grew fainter up the shaft.
XXV.