A riderless brown pony, very cautious and very wise, stepping carefully from ledge to ledge, testing his footing and picking his way with the greatest of skill, was the messenger upon whom depended all hope of safety for Beatrice, Nancy, and John Herrick. Tucked under his stirrup leather was a note that Beatrice had scrawled hastily on the scrap of paper that had wrapped their sandwiches. It was addressed to Dr. Minturn and told where they were and how desperate was their need. She had knotted the bridle reins on Presto’s neck, turned up the stirrups over the saddle, given him a slap on the flank and told him to “go home.” Every well-trained Western horse knows that order, and will find his way over the steepest trails back to his own stable, nor will he allow himself to be stopped or molested on the way.

“It is lucky we had Presto,” Beatrice said to her sister. “Buck or your horse would have taken twice as long to get home, and Hester and Aunt Anna would be so frightened, though Olaf would have known what to do. As it is, they won’t worry, for I said I might stay another day. I wonder how soon help can come.”

John Herrick, lying very still among the blankets, made no comment. They began to realize that he had summoned all his strength to pretend he was not much hurt and to persuade them to leave him. It was plain that he was suffering intensely, and was resting before trying to go on with what he had to say.

“Unsaddle Nancy’s pony,” he directed at last, “and turn him loose. Without his saddle he will know he is turned out to graze and will not go home. He will drift down the mountain and find shelter somewhere in the timber, for he could not go through the storm here on the hill.”

The sides of the tent flapped and quivered in the eddies of the wind as the gale began to blow heavier. Under John Herrick’s direction, they rolled stones on the edge of the canvas to keep the blast from creeping under it, and laid larger logs of wood at the back of the fire to make a slower, steadier blaze.

The smoke of the fire, with most of its heat also, was tossed and whirled out into the void, but they were able finally to hang up a spare tarpaulin to reflect the warmth into the tent. The site of the camp had been chosen wisely, being sheltered by a high shoulder of rock, with a nook between two stones to hold the fire, and a small stream pouring over a cliff near by. Yet, even in this corner, there was not complete protection from the roaring blast that was beginning to carry the first flakes of snow. More than once Beatrice saw the injured man’s eyes turn anxiously toward the pile of fuel, gathered in abundance for ordinary purposes, but pitifully small for the need that had arisen now. She knew that he would not tell them of the necessity for gathering more, since to seek fire-wood on that windswept mountain was a dangerous and difficult task.

“Go into the tent and talk to him, Nancy. Keep him looking another way,” she whispered as she fed the blaze. “I am going down the trail a little way to cut some brush.”

Taking up the small ax from where he had left it beside the fire and turning her coat collar up to her ears, she slipped away before her sister could protest.

The wind whipped about her the moment she passed beyond the sheltering rock, buffeting and blinding her until she thought she would be flung from the ledge. She had never felt such piercing cold. It cut through her coat and made her fingers and feet ache in a moment. Valiantly she struggled forward, getting her bearings gradually and peering this way and that through the driving snow to find the fuel that was so desperately needed. Among the tufts of scrubby bushes that clung here and there to the stony slope, it was difficult to discover anything dry enough to burn. Nor was it easy to cut through the tough, fibrous stems that had clung to the mountain in defiance of so many storms. As she became more used to her task, however, she began to see more and more what she could use; the brisk exercise warmed her, and the armfuls of brush that she carried back and heaped up by the tent began to grow encouragingly high.

“Don’t go again,” Nancy begged at last. “It is getting dark, and you are going farther and farther away. I know you should not try it any more.”

“Only one more trip,” Beatrice returned blithely. “I won’t leave this upper stretch of trail, and that is safe enough.”

She was beginning to enjoy her task, to feel a glowing defiance of the wind that pushed and swayed her; and she was conscious of a warming pride in that heap of fuel that meant comfort, even life, to the three of them. This time she went farther afield than before, beyond where she had found John Herrick, along the ledge to a spur of rock where she had guessed a good growth of underbrush might be found in the sheltered hollow. She found that her surmise was correct and harvested a generous fagot of dry brush and some heavier branches. Then she scrambled further along the slope, where a dry, stunted little tree held up its dead and twisted arms against the sky.

“Its trunk will burn famously,” she told herself, perhaps to quiet any misgivings she felt concerning the treacherous ground over which she must pass. Bracing herself, she swung the short-handled ax and cut deep into the wood. Once she struck, and again, then heard the preliminary crack that signaled the surrender of the tough old tree. She leaned forward for the last blow—and felt the ground crumble under foot so that she lost her balance and fell. Over and over she rolled, down a long slope of sharp stones that cut her hands and bruised her face, offering no support as, with outstretched hands, she snatched at any hold that would stop her fall.

A little juniper bush, whose branch caught her dress and to whose roots she clung with bleeding, frantic hands, held her at last. Beyond, in a great well of shadows, she could peer down and down, but could see nothing beneath her, could only hear the tinkle of the ax as it struck a stone far below. She shuddered as she looked into that dusky emptiness, then resolutely turned away and clambered up the slope.

“Though how I managed it,” she confessed to Nancy some time afterward, “I simply couldn’t tell you. When I rolled down the hill, my heart seemed to be rolling over and over, too, inside me, and it was still doing it all the time I was crawling up again. The stones slipped under my feet, and every bush I took hold of seemed to give way in my hand. It was only because I had to get back to you that I ever scrambled up again.”

Yet when she reached the steadier footing of the trail, she saw the dead tree that had been the cause of her undoing, and setting her teeth, climbed out once more, inch by inch, gave the half-severed trunk a jerk, and brought it away in triumph. She had almost more than she could carry, and her heart was beating fast as she struggled up the path once more, warm, excited, and happy.

“I thought you were never coming back,” said Nancy anxiously. She was kneeling by the fire, stirring something in a tin cup.

“I—I went further than I intended,” Beatrice answered and, for the moment, offered no more extensive report of her adventure. When she went into the tent, however John Herrick opened his eyes to look at her with troubled questioning.

“Where have you been so long?” he asked. “Nancy would not tell me, so I know it was something unsafe.”

“I was just cutting some brush for the fire,” she returned cheerfully. “I took your ax and I—I didn’t bring it back with me.”

His observant blue eyes went over her from head to foot, and his face, drawn with pain though it was, wrinkled to a smile. He did not overlook, as Nancy had done, her damaged skirt and her bleeding knuckles. When he spoke it was so low that she had to stoop down to hear.

“Have I not enough to blame myself for, without having to see some terrible thing happen to you here on this cruel mountain? I am proud that you belong to me, you and that blessed, warm-hearted Nancy. Can you ever forgive me?”

“Forgive you for what?” she asked protestingly.

“For all that I have done.”

Nancy came in at this moment, carrying something very carefully.

“Christina told me that when people camp in the snow,” she said, “they warm their beds with hot stones, so I have raked some out of the fire, nice, flat ones, piping hot.”

She packed them in among the blankets with the deftness of a trained nurse, for Nancy was possessed, by nature, of a comforting touch.

“I am better now,” he declared, trying to smile reassuringly upon them both, although the color of his face, ghastly white under the sunburn, belied his words. “I want you to sit down and tell me—” his voice faltered, but in a moment he went on again—“and tell me about Anna. Is she getting well? How long has she been ill? Did she really come here to—to——”

His voice trailed away to a gasping whisper, but Beatrice knew what he wished to ask.

“She came to find you,” she answered. “You shall hear all about it. No, don’t move; it will make your arm begin to bleed again. Lie still and we will tell you everything.”

With the wind howling over their heads, but with the slow heat of the fire keeping the worst of the cold at bay, they sat there by him and told the whole of their tale. Sometimes one of them would get up to throw some more fuel upon the flame and the other would take up the story in the interval. Now and then he would ask a half-audible question, but mostly he lay quite quiet, his steady eyes—how like they were to Aunt Anna’s!—fixed upon the face of the girl who was speaking. When the account was finished, he had various things to ask, often with long pauses for rest between the words.

“Do you live in the same house—it was the one where your father and Anna and I were born? Does Bridget Flynn still stay with you? Which of you sleeps in the blue room where on stormy nights you can hear the rain in the big chimney?”

Yes, they lived in the house he knew. Bridget Flynn, the old nurse who had cared for them all, was not with them but was still alive. Beatrice had the big south room—it was green now,—but the rain in the chimney was just the same.

“How it does come back!” he said at last with a sigh; “and to think that I have been such a fool as to believe that I could put all that I loved so much behind me.”

His voice failed after that and his questions ceased. They could hear his faint breathing and feel the thin, uneven pulse in his wrist, but he did not move or give other sign of life. The night had closed about them, the storm was still blowing louder, and the cold growing more intense. Snow was piling about the tent, eddying through the opening, lying in white drifts even among the folds of the blankets.

They crept back to the fire at last, both of them wondering miserably at the heaviness of his stupor, but trying to assure themselves that it was really sleep. Very closely they huddled together, sharing the single blanket that was wrapped about them, saying very little but thinking very much.

“Aunt Anna will be going to bed now,” Nancy observed, after such long quiet that Beatrice had thought she was nodding. “Christina will be lighting the lamps and tucking in the fur rugs on the sleeping-porch.”

Since Beatrice scarcely answered, but sat staring, though with unseeing eyes, at the red coals, Nancy spoke again.

“Are you cold, Beatrice? Are you afraid? How soon do you think help will come?”

“It will come soon,” her sister answered confidently. “No, I am not cold, and I am not afraid.”

Nancy, willing to be reassured, crept closer and allowed her heavy eyelids, weighed down by drowsiness, to fall lower and lower. Beatrice, however, sat erect and wide awake. She was counting the number of hours before Dr. Minturn could get her message, calculating the time their fuel would last. By midnight the final log would be burned, the last bundle of brush would have gone up in windswept sparks. And what was to come when the fire was dead?

She felt strangely quiet in spite of all the dread possibilities before her. She thought over, one by one, all the events in that long, twisted chain of circumstances that had brought her here, and realized all that she had learned, how much she had changed. Could it be possible that she had once been so absorbed in her own affairs, in the pleasures and interests of her single, restricted circle, as to have been blind to her father’s anxiety and to Aunt Anna’s slowly breaking heart? She had left behind, also, that restless discontent and nameless dissatisfaction that used suddenly to spring up in the midst of the careless happiness of the old life. Even when they first came to live in the cabin she had been filled with anxiety and the weight of unfamiliar responsibility, but such misgivings had disappeared also, blown completely away into the past by the winds of Gray Cloud Mountain. Here she had learned new things, had felt new strength, had begun to play a part in the real affairs of life.

Nancy, leaning against her, had dropped sound asleep and Beatrice herself dozed at last. Her last clear thought had been of Dabney Mills. Even the puzzle of his suspicions would be solved, she felt sure. But why had he thought——?

Her eyes closed and opened again with a start upon a different world. She could not tell how long a time had passed. The storm was over, the moon was up and the whole mountain-side was bathed in light. Leaning forward, she attempted to look down into the valley and was surprised to see no valley there. A level floor of clouds, as smooth as the surface of a lake, but of a strange, shadowy whiteness that no water could ever show, lay below her, a flood of mist that filled Broken Bow Valley to the brim. Fascinated, she sat watching, while the moonlight grew clearer and the soft white turned to glistening silver. Although she thought herself awake, she dozed again, for she had a dim idea that she could walk forth on the smooth level of that white floor, past the mountain tops, straight away toward the moon, while all the time another self sat cold and nodding by the fire, feeding the failing flame mechanically, with one arm around the slumbering Nancy. Vaguely she knew that complete oblivion would mean the end of the fire, the quenching of the warmth that kept them alive and of the light that was to be a signal to their rescuers.

How she longed to lay down her head and give herself up to slumber! How far away her dream was carrying her, out across that white sea whose further edge seemed to roll across the peaks and break against the stars! Some inward spirit kept her faithful to her task, even after real consciousness had vanished. When she did give up to heavy slumber it was only when her work was done, when her drowsy ears heard afar the chink of iron hoofs upon the trail, heard the scrambling of feet and the sound of men’s voices coming nearer.

“They are coming; they see us,” she thought, and her head dropped upon her arm in absolute exhaustion.

It must have been only for a moment that she slept, although it seemed that hours must have passed when she awoke with a jump to a bewildered confusion of sights and sounds. The red light of a lantern was flashing in her face, the huge, grotesque shadow of a horse’s head danced back and forth on the rock wall beside her, and Dr. Minturn’s voice sounded in her ear.

“Beatrice, are you safe? Are you alive?”

Dazzled and confused, she rubbed her eyes, then motioned toward the tent where John Herrick lay, since words of explanation would not come quickly enough. She held her breath, so it seemed to her, through all the minutes that the doctor was bending to examine the unconscious man. When he straightened up again to speak to her, how comforting it was to hear that big voice booming out where the last sound had been John Herrick’s failing whisper!

“He has gone a long way,” the old doctor said, “but please heaven, we’ll bring him back again.”