Part 9

“I suppose you don’t: no man has ever seen the back of his own neck--or the close limitations of his own rut. But the furrow is already started. You are not the man you were when we took to the tall hills last summer.”

“Better, or worse?”

“Let us say different. The man you are now would never go back to school-teaching in New Hampshire.”

Philip nodded morosely. “I admitted that, a good while ago, if you’ll remember. But we were talking about Garth. What are we going to do with him after the winter is over? Pay him his wages and tell him to go?”

“I have been thinking about that. It occurs to me that we already owe him more than wages. If you hadn’t met him on the way out with the ponies and brought him back with you----”

“I know; you couldn’t have held out alone against the Neighbors gang very long; and if I had come back by myself, there might have been a different story to tell. When I made the bargain with Garth, he said all he’d ask would be a chance to locate a claim near ours.”

“Anybody who gets here first can have that.”

“That is what I told him. Never mind; we’ll see about his case when spring comes. I’ll agree if you think we ought to do something better than day-wages for him.”

Further talk about Garth and his deserts was halted by the incoming of the man himself, empty-handed.

“No good,” was his grumbling comment on the night deer stalking. “Reckon we don’t get us no more deer meat this winter. I like to got bogged down myself, gettin’ out to the water hole. There shore is one big heap o’ snow in this neck o’ woods, if you’ll listen at me. _And_ more a-comin’.”

“Another storm?” said Philip.

“Shore as you’re a foot high. And that makes me say what I does. I don’t like the looks o’ the way she’s pilin’ up on the spur back o’ this wickiup of ourn. The timber up there ain’t thick enough to hold ’er if she gets much heavier. There’s two ways it can slide; down to-wards the creek, ’r straight down thisaway. Here’s hopin’.”

This was disturbing news. They had already seen one slide come down on the opposite, thinly wooded side of the gulch, and it had afforded an object-lesson as convincing as it was startling. Garth had had hair-raising stories to tell of prospectors’ cabins crushed and buried under thousands of tons of snow and débris, and their cabin site had been chosen wholly without reference to safety from this peril.

“Can’t we do anything more than hope?” Philip asked, making room for the giant before the fire.

“Could, maybe, if we had snow-shoes.”

“How?” It was Bromley who wanted to know.

“Shuffle up yonder and start the slide sideways with a blast. But we ain’t got the shoes; and there ain’t nobody goin’ to h’ist hisself up on that li’l’ hill without ’em. Yuh can bet your bottom dollar on that.”

Garth’s prediction of another storm had its fulfilment within the next few hours; and for two days and nights the feathery burden sifted down almost continuously, adding unmeasured depths to the already heavy blanketing of a whitened wilderness. Trees that had withstood the storms of many years came crashing down under the added load, and for the first time in the winter the three cabin dwellers were forced to resort to melted snow for their drinking and cooking water; it was impossible to keep the trail open to the creek; indeed, for the two days of storm they found it useless to try to work in the mine.

During the period of enforced idleness, Garth busied himself hewing and whittling out a pair of skis, for which the light spruce they had cut for firewood furnished the material. Asked what he meant to do with his footgear, he was non-committal, merely saying that he wanted to be doing something, and that the skis might be handy to have around if the spring should be late in coming.

“We’re chawin’ a mighty big hole in the grub-stake,” he added. “Maybe we’ll have to take to the woods, yit, for more meat.”

But a starker use for the skis presented itself two nights later, when they were all awakened by a muffled crash that made the solidly built cabin rock as if shaken by an earthquake shock. Garth was the first to leap afoot and give the alarm.

“Grab for yer clothes and blankets and run for it!” he shouted. “It’s the slide a-comin’ down!”

Struggling into their clothes in frantic haste, the two who were the most unready to fly for their lives joined Garth in the small cleared area they had been keeping open in front of the cabin. It was a bright, moonlit night, clear, calm and deadly cold. From the shovelled areaway they could see that the low cliff behind the cabin had disappeared, its place being taken by a slanting snowbank reaching up to the steep slope of the mountain above. On the height they could plainly see the gash left by the sliding mass that was now filling the space between the cliff and the cabin and heaping itself well up toward the ridge-pole on the roof.

“There she is,” said Garth, pointing. “If that other chunk lets go, it’ll be hell and repeat for the cabin! We got to get a hump on us, mighty sudden!”

“But what can we do?” Philip demanded.

“Ain’t but one thing. That snow mount’in a-hangin’ up there over us’ll have to be eased down slaunchwise, ’r we’ll have it on top of us, shore as shootin’. Come inside and dig out the powder and fuse whilst I’m riggin’ for it!”

A handful of brush thrown into the fireplace blazed up, illuminating the interior of the cabin fitfully. In the firelight they could see that the rafters on the side facing the cliff were buckling dangerously. Opening the door communicating with the lean-to where they stored the provisions and explosives, they found the roof crushed in and the contents of the small room half buried in snow. Garth had flung the deerskin over his shoulders and was belting it about his waist. “One of you get them skis down,” he commanded.

It was Philip who took the skis from their pegs on the wall, but it was the play-boy who cut in quickly to say: “See here, Jim; it isn’t your job to go up there and shoot that drift! Let me have those skis.”

“Like hell I will!” was the brusque refusal. “Didn’t you tell me, t’other day, that you’d never had ’em on? Gimme that powder and fuse.”

“But there’s nothing like this in your contract,” Bromley insisted.

“Contract be damned! You goin’ to stand there chewin’ the rag till that drift comes down and chokes you off? Gimme that stuff!”

“The dynamite will be frozen--it’s frozen now,” said Philip.

“It’ll be thawed out good-and-plenty, time I get up there,” Garth asserted, cramming the coil of fuse into a pocket and opening his shirt to thrust the dynamite cartridges in his armpit next the bare skin. “Open the door and lemme out!”

Bitter cold as it was, they sallied out with him and watched him as he “crabbed” over the drifts sidewise and began the ascent on the nose of the spur. There was nothing they could do. Until the menace of the overhanging avalanche should be removed, it would be a mere flirting with death to try to relieve the cabin roof of its buckling burden. In a few minutes Garth became a shapeless, climbing blot in the moonlight on the bare slope, the muffling deerskin making him look like a clumsy animal. That he could reach the critical point, impeded as he was by the awkward foot-rigging, seemed incredible to the anxious watchers below. Yet without the skis to support his weight, he could have done nothing.

“Th-there goes a brave man, if you’ll l-listen to me!” stammered Bromley between his teeth chatterings. Then: “D-did you say something a time ago about dirty fingernails and such small matters?”

“_Don’t!_” exclaimed Philip sharply. And after a breath-holding moment: “I’m a cad and a coward, Harry. I let you try to make him turn that job over to you a few minutes ago, and I never said a word: I was scared crazy for fear you’d insist upon the three of us drawing straws for it and the lot would fall to me! That is God’s truth. Now and then I get a glimpse of the real man inside of me, and then I know I’m not fit to live in the same world with you and Jim Garth.”

“Easy,” Bromley deprecated. “After all, if the thing can be done, Garth is the one who can come the nearest to pulling it off. We both know that--and he knows it, too.”

The big man had climbed out of sight behind a clump of trees, but now he reappeared higher up the slope and not far from the impending mass that was threatening to break down upon the cabin. They saw him prodding in the snow with the staff he carried and knew he was planting the dynamite.

“Good Lord!” groaned Bromley, “why doesn’t he get above it? If he fires it from where he is now, it will catch him, sure!”

“It’s the drift; he can’t get above it--don’t you see how it lips out over his head? Besides, it’s got to be shot from that side. If it isn’t, it will come straight down this way.”

“But, _Philip_! It’s suicide for him to shoot it from where he is now!”

“It looks that way. But that’s what he is doing. He is lighting the fuses now--don’t you see them sputtering?”

Garth had risen to his feet, but now they saw him stoop again, as if he were adjusting the fastenings of the skis. In the brilliant moonlight they saw, or fancied they could see, the thin, wavering curls of smoke rising from the burning fuses. Still the big man was crouching within arm’s-reach of the blasts he had planted and set alight.

“God in heaven! Why doesn’t he get away from there?” The words stuck in Philip’s throat and became an almost inarticulate cry. Garth was up again and was evidently trying to edge away along the steep snow slope. It was plainly apparent that something had gone wrong with one of the long, unmanageable skis. For two or three of the edging steps he contrived to keep it under him; then it came off and slid away down the slope, and the two watchers saw him fall sidewise, buried to the hip on the side that had lost its support.

With terrifying distinctness they saw him struggle as a man fighting desperately for life. With one ski gone, the other was only a shackle to hold him down. Fiercely he strove to kick the manacling thing off, beating frantically with his bare hands, meanwhile, at the sputtering fuses in an effort to extinguish them before the fire should reach the dynamite. At last he gave over trying to free himself from the one encumbering ski, and struggling out of the snowy pit into which his exertions had sunk him, sought to roll aside out of the path of the impending avalanche.

Given a few more precious seconds of time he might have made it. But the reprieve was too short. Before he had floundered a dozen yards the snow dam holding the huge cliff-top drift in leash leaped into the air like a spouting geyser to the muffled cough of a triple explosion, and an enormous white cataract poured into the gulch a short distance valley-wards of the half-buried cabin.

“Shovels!” Bromley yelped; and together the two horrified witnesses raced up to the tunnel for digging tools. When they ran back they had to wallow waist deep in the yielding mass to reach the spot where the tip of an up-ended ski marked the grave of the buried man; and they had little hope of finding him alive as they burrowed desperately to uncover him.

But Big Jim’s time to die had not yet come. When he had found himself going, he had had the presence of mind to draw a fold of the deerskin over his face, holding it with a crooking arm. He was all but asphyxiated when they dragged him out of his snowy grave, but the fresh air soon revived him; apart from a wrenched ankle owed to the too-well fastened ski, he seemed to be unhurt.

None the less, back in the cabin and hovering over a roaring fire in an attempt to thaw himself out, the big man began to shake as if in an ague fit, paying the penalty of his violent exertions in a teeth-rattling chill. In buying the winter’s supplies in Leadville, Bromley had included a bottle of whiskey for emergencies. Philip searched for the bottle in the wrecked storeroom, found it unbroken, and poured a drink for Garth. The effect was magical. The chill subsided and Garth begged for another drink, the single potation making him loose-tongued and volubly eloquent. Philip said “no” firmly, and hid the bottle; after which, with Bromley’s help, he got Garth out of his wet clothes and into his bunk.

The giant fell asleep at once, or seemed to; and after deciding that the buckled cabin roof would hold until they could have daylight for its unloading, the two who were still stirring dried themselves out before the fire, covered the embers and went to bed. When they awoke, the sun was shining in at the single small window of the cabin, and Garth was still asleep, or he appeared to be. But the empty whiskey bottle lying on the earthen floor beside his bunk told another story.

“Look at that! There’s your ‘rough diamond’--dead drunk!” Philip commented scornfully, sitting up in his bed and pointing across to the comatose figure in the opposite bunk. “He was only shamming after we put him to bed last night. He waited until we were asleep and then got up and found the liquor. I have no use for a man who has no more self-control or decency than that!”

But the play-boy was shaking his head.

“‘Touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless’,” he quoted sardonically. “That’s you, Philip. It’s a gruesome thing to have lived such a truly good life oneself that one can’t light a little candle of charity for the poor sinners. I can’t forget that Big Jim risked his life last night--and nearly lost it--to save us from being turned out homeless and starving in this howling desert. Let’s get a bite to eat and unload this roof while he’s sleeping it off.”

X

WITH the threat of the snow slides definitely removed, the routine of ore-digging was resumed. Deeper and deeper the tunnel was driven into the mountain, and each day saw the accumulation of ore and broken rock on the dump grow in proportion. Nothing was said by any one of the three about Garth’s night raid on the whiskey bottle; but Philip’s attitude toward the big miner was stiffer for the lapse--as Bromley’s was gentler. Since there was no more liquor in the stores, there were no more lapses; and no fault could be found with the way Garth spent himself in the drilling and shovelling, the ore-carrying and sorting.

After a fortnight of bright sunshine in January, with a thaw that merely compacted the surface of the great snow blanket without perceptibly thinning it, the cold weather came again; there were night temperatures that made the green logs of the cabin walls crack and snap with sounds like pistol shots, and the clay chinkings became broad lines of hoar frost--this though the fire on the hearth was never allowed to die down. With an ample supply of fuel they suffered little from the cold; but by the middle of February the provisions were running very low. Bromley’s turn at the cooking came in the final week of the month, and it was he who found the bottom of their last sack of potatoes.

“We can kiss the dear old Murphys good-by with this supper,” he announced cheerfully, as he shook up and salted the last boiling in the pot; adding: “And everything else in the chuck-hole is going the same way,” Then to Garth: “You know a lot more about these mountain winters than we do, Jim. How long is it going to be before we can break trail for Leadville?”

“Wish I knowed,” was the sober answer. “Two year ago it was the last o’ May afore you could get over the range on most o’ the trails.”

Bromley gave a low whistle. “Two months, and more, of this? In less than half that time we’ll be licking the skillet.”

Philip helped himself sparingly to the potatoes. “That means short rations,” he thrust in morosely. “We ought to have had sense enough to begin limiting ourselves long ago. Half quantities, from this time on, Harry.”

Accordingly, the rationing was begun with the next meal, and thereupon a grim battle with a foe hitherto unconfronted dragged its steadily weakening length through the days and weeks. Day after day they toiled doggedly in the tunnel, and night after night turned in hungry after the long hours of hard work. As the hunger grew upon them they fell silent; hours would pass without the exchange of a word; and a gloom, which was not to be dispelled even by Bromley’s gallant attempts at cheerfulness, settled down upon them.

It was in this famine time that the dour malady known as cabin madness began to show its grisly head; the sickness that seizes upon cabin dwellers shut in with one another and shut off from other human contacts. As his ancestry and rearing would postulate, Philip was the first to fall a victim to the splenetic mania, developing an increasing irritability, with Garth for its principal target. As the hunger pangs grew sharper, Bromley could see that the giant’s rough good nature was slowly breaking down under Philip’s harsh girdings; that a time was approaching in which surly bickerings would flare into open antagonism and violence; and he did his best to stave off the evil day.

Unhappily, his best was not good enough. The volcanic outburst came one evening while they were eating their scanty supper. Garth, who had dug his home-made skis out of the slide, had climbed to the slope above the mine to make sure that the tunnel portal and ore piles were not menaced by another avalanche. While he was about it, Philip, coming out of the mine to sharpen drills at the forge, had seen Garth working his way cautiously along the upper slope of the spur. At supper he flatly accused the mountain man of making an examination of the slide menace an excuse for staking off a claim of his own which would intersect the “Little Jean” at a certain depth in the hill.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on you!” he wound up harshly. “You may think because we’re tenderfoots we can’t see through a millstone when there’s a hole in it, but if you do, you’re missing it a thousand miles!”

“_Philip!_ You don’t know what you’re saying!” Bromley interposed quickly. “Jim’s all right. Why, good Lord!----”

“You keep out of it!” Philip snapped back angrily. “You may be blind but by God, I’m not!”

The big man was frowning sourly at his accuser.

“Say,” he growled in slow belligerence, “I been thinkin’, for quite a li’l’ spell, that the time was a-comin’ when I’d have to take yuh over my knee and larrup yuh a few. I reckon you’ve fetched it, now. You’re the first livin’ live man that ever told Big Jim Garth to his face that he wasn’t on the square; and when you say it, you’re a liar!”

Like a bolt from a crossbow, Philip hurled himself upon Garth, clearing the hewn slab that served as a table at a bound. The attack was so sudden that the big man was toppled off the block of wood upon which he was sitting, and the two went down in a fierce clinch. Bromley sprang up and strove to separate the combatants as they rolled over and over upon the earth floor, striking and clutching madly at each other. But the half-rations upon which they had all been starving for weeks proved the better, or at least the more effectual, peacemaker. Breathless exhaustion came speedily to both men to make the frenzied struggle degenerate into a mere beating of the air; and when a sullen peace had been patched up through Bromley’s urgings, Philip staggered outdoors to hold a handful of snow to an eye that had stopped a blow from Garth’s fist in the brief battle.

The aftermath of this savage flare-up marked an abysmal difference in the characteristics of the two men; rather, perhaps, it served to mark the distance Philip had come on the road to moral disintegration. Having fought it out with his accuser in some sort, the rough frontiersman was willing to let bygones be bygones; and he tried patiently, in a blundering way, to make this plain. But Philip held stubbornly aloof. With the cabin madness still souring in his veins he had less and less to say to either of his fellow sufferers, and his attitude toward Garth continued to be suspiciously hostile.

It was in the latter part of April, when the snow blanket had begun to shrink visibly under the rays of the mounting sun, and the creek in the valley had burst its icy bonds and was running bank full, that they came to the famine end of things. A fortnight earlier even the short working shifts in the mine to which weakness had reduced them had been discontinued, and for days Garth, slipping and sliding on his home-made skis had been going forth with his rifle in search of food, only to return at night empty-handed and with the same growling lament.

“I’m jist so razzle-dazzled an’ no-account I ain’t fittin’ to do nothin’ no more! They’s deer a-plenty in these here mount’ins--I see ’em every day; but I can’t see to shoot straight; never will get one less’n it lets me come close enough to grab it by the neck and choke it to death!”

With the beginning of the last week in April the losing battle with hunger had become a grim waiting game, with their final reserves of endurance pitted against the chance of the weather. If the thawing weather should continue, if there should be no more storms, a few more days might make foot travel over the passes possible. But even so, the forty miles of snowy wilderness to be traversed loomed dismayingly. Could they, in their weakened condition, fight their way out over the slippery trails? It was an open question, and one which Philip, in whom the cabin madness had now reached the stage of hopeless dejection, answered in a gloomy negative.

“What’s the use of talking that way, Harry?” he raged weakly--this on a day when Garth had once more gone out to waste powder and lead. “You know well enough we couldn’t make five miles a day in the condition we’re in now.” Then, with a jeering laugh: “This is the end of it.... With gold enough up there on the dump to sink a ship, we’re starving to death. With a world full of food only thirty or forty miles away, we can’t buy enough to keep us alive until the snows go.”