A Damaged Reputation

"Still, I intend to take it. We have gone into this before. If I leave Dayspring before I find the silver, I leave it dead."

Brooke made a little gesture of resignation. "Well," he said, "I have done all I could, and now, if you will pour that flour into the pan, we'll have breakfast."

Both men were silent during the frugal meal, for they knew what they had to look forward to, and the cold silence of the lonely land already weighed upon their spirits. Long weeks of solitude must be dragged through before the men who were going south that morning came back again, while there might very well be interludes of scarcity, and hunger is singularly hard to bear with the temperature at forty degrees below. Allonby only trifled with his food, and smiled drily when at last he thrust his plate aside.

"Dollars are not to be picked up easily anywhere, and you and I are going to find out the full value of them before the thaw begins again," he said. "We shall, no doubt, also discover how thoroughly nauseated one can become with his companion's company. I have heard of men wintering in the mountains who tried to kill one another."

Brooke laughed. "It's scarcely likely we will go quite as far as that, though I certainly remember two men in the Quatomac Valley who flung everything in the range at each other periodically. One was inordinately fond of green stuff, and his partner usually started the circus by telling him to take his clothes off, and go out like Nebuchadnezzar. They refitted with wood-pulp ware when the proceedings became expensive."

Just then there was a knock upon the door, which swung open, and a cluster of shadowy figures, with their breath floating like steam about them, appeared outside it. One of them flung a deerhide bag into the room.

"We figured we needn't trail quite so much grub along, and I guess you'll want it," a voice said. "Neither of you changed your minds 'bout lighting out of this?"

"I don't like to take it from you, boys," said Brooke, who recognized the rough kindliness which had prompted the men to strip themselves of the greater portion of their provisions. "You can't have more than enough for one day's march left."

"I guess a man never hits the trail so hard as when he knows he has to," somebody said. "It will keep us on the rustle till we fetch Truscott's. Well, you're not coming?"

For just a moment Brooke felt his resolution wavering, and, under different circumstances, he might have taken Allonby by force, and gone with them, but by a somewhat involved train of reasoning he felt that it was incumbent upon him to stay on at the mine because Barbara Heathcote had once trusted him. It had been tolerably evident from her attitude when he had last seen her, that she had very little confidence in him now, but that did not seem to affect the question, and most men are a trifle illogical at times.

"No," he said, with somewhat forced indifference. "Still, I don't mind admitting that I wish we were."

The man laughed. "Then I guess we'll pull out. We'll think of you two now and then when we're lying round beside the stove in Vancouver."

Brooke said nothing further. There was a tramp of feet, and the shadowy figures melted into the dimness beneath the pines. Then the last footfall died away, and the silence of the mountains suddenly seemed to grow overwhelming. Brooke turned to Allonby, who smiled.

"You will," he said, "feel it considerably worse before the next three months are over, and probably be willing to admit that there is some excuse for my shortcomings in one direction. I have, I may mention, put in a good many winters here."

Brooke swung round abruptly. "I'm going to work in the mine. It's fortunate that one man can just manage that new boring machine."

He left Allonby in the shanty, and toiled throughout that day, and several dreary weeks, during most of which the pines roared beneath the icy gales and blinding snow swirled down the valley. What he did was of very slight effect, but it kept him from thinking, which, he felt, was a necessity, and he only desisted at length from physical incapacity for further labor. The snow, it was evident, had choked the passes, so that no laden beast could make the hazardous journey over them, for the anxiously-expected freighter did not arrive, and there was an increasing scarcity of provisions as the days dragged by; while Brooke discovered that a handful of mouldy floor and a few inches of rancid pork daily is not sufficient to keep a man's full strength in him. Then, when an Arctic frost followed the snow, Allonby fell sick, and one bitter evening, when an icy wind came wailing down the valley, it dawned upon his comrade that his condition was becoming precarious. Saying nothing, he busied himself about the stove, and smiled reassuringly when Allonby turned to him.

"Are we to hold a festival to-night, since you seem to be cooking what should keep us for a week?" said the latter.

"I almost fancy it would keep one of us for several days, which, since you do not seem especially capable of getting anything ready for yourself, is what it is intended to do," said Brooke. "I shall probably be that time in making the settlement and getting back again."

"What are you going there for?"

"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 passes, 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 passed 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. "Nobody 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 débris 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 hoarsely. "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.