CHAPTER ONE

One forenoon, in the winter of the great storms that swept the Pacific States, Adrian Wilder, a tall, slender, dark young man, stood in front of his stone hut on a shoulder of Mt. Shasta and watched the assembling of the elemental furies to do their savage work in the mountains. By all the signs that he had learned he knew that mighty havoc was to be done; but he did not foresee, nor did the oldest residents of that wilderness, that this was the beginning of the most memorable winter of terrors known to the white man’s history of the region.

A strong sense of security and comfort filled him as, turning from the gathering tumult about him, he studied the resistance of his hut. He, with Dr. Malbone’s help, had built it from foundation to roof, using the almost perfectly shaped blocks from the talus of the lofty perpendicular basalt cliff at whose base he had built his nest that summer. With nice discrimination he had selected the stones from the great heap that stretched far down from one end of the shelf upon which he had built; with mud he had fitted the stones to form floor, walls, arched roof, and chimney. With boards and a window-sash borne by him up the mountain from the road in the canon he had fashioned a window and doors. By the same means—for the shelf was inaccessible to a wagon—he had brought furniture, books, provisions, and fuel.

The hut was strong and comfortable.

Should snow fall to a great depth, he could easily shovel it down the steep slope of the canon. Should an avalanche come,—that made him wince. Still, he had made calculations on that account. By arching the roof of his hut he had given it great strength. Better than that, should an avalanche plunge over the edge of the cliff it must first gather great speed and momentum. Stretching back mountainward from the top of the cliff was a considerable space nearly level; an avalanche descending from the higher reaches of the vast mountain would likely stop on this level ground; but should it be so great and swift as to pass over, its momentum would likely carry it safely over his hut, as the water of a swiftly running stream, plunging over a ledge, leaves a dry space between itself and the wall.

But why think of the avalanche, with its crushing, burying snow, and, far worse, its formidable bowlders that could annihilate any structure made by men? It were better to think of the comfort and security of the hut, and listen to the pleasant music of the little stream at the base of the cliff.

Better still was it to view the coming onslaught of the elements; to note the marvellous coherency of the plan by which their destruction was to be wrought; to observe how the splendid forces at play worked in intelligent harmony to shape a malevolent design. To a man of Wilder’s fine sensibilities, every fury unleashed in the gathering tumult seemed to be possessed of superhuman malignancy of purpose and capability of execution. The furious wind that came driving down the canon lying far below him was the breath of the approaching multitude of storm-demons. The giant trees on the slopes of the canon seemed to brace themselves against the impending assault. Behind the wind, filling all the sky with a gray blanket that darkened away to the source of the wind, was the silent, stealthy snow-cloud, waiting to follow up and bury the havoc of the wind, and finish the destruction that the wind would begin.

From contemplation of this splendid spectacle the young man’s thoughts turned to the dangers with which the storm threatened the mountain folk, most of whom were engaged in the lumber traffic. Would any of these be cut off from their homes? The rising rage of the wind indicated the closing of all the roads with fallen trees: would that bring serious hardships to any? In the summer, now past, the environs and flanks of Mt. Shasta had sparkled with the life and gayety of hundreds of seekers for health and pleasure,—the wealthy thronging a few fashionable resorts, the poorer constrained to a closer touch with nature and the spirit of the vast white mountain; but they now were gone, and the splendid wilderness was left to the savage elements of winter. Had any delayed their leaving and were at that moment in the drag-net of the storm?

Above all, there was Wilder’s one close friend in the mountains, Dr. Malbone, who, like Wilder, had left the turmoil of city life to bury himself in these wild fastnesses. They had known each other in San Francisco years before. For five years the scattered people of the mountains had employed the services of this skilful physician, and had come to trust and honor him in the touching way that simple natures trust and honor a commanding soul. It was Dr. Malbone who had so wisely assisted in the building of the stone cabin at the foot of the cliff. It was he who had explained the principle of the arch to the younger man, and had shown him how to bend and place the supports of the growing arch until the keystones were fitted in. It was he who had explained the mysteries and uses of ties and buttresses. What would Dr. Malbone do in the storm? What risks would he run, to what hardships be exposed, in visiting his patients? Only a few miles separated these two friends, but with such a storm as was hastening forward these few might as well be thousands.

Far up the canon Wilder heard the first fierce impact of the storm, for the heavy crash of a falling tree sounded above the roaring of the wind. By walking cautiously out to the extremity of a point that projected from the shelf upon which his cabin stood, he had been accustomed to see the snowy domes of Mt. Shasta. He knew that the storm sweeping down the canon was but a feeble echo of the mightier tumult on the great father of the north. In the hope that he might see something of this greater battle, he now made his way to the extremity of the point, the wind making his footing insecure; but only broad slaty clouds were visible in that direction, transmitting the deep rumblings of the hurricane that raged about Mt. Shasta’s higher slopes.

It was while standing on the extremity of the point that the young man, turning his glance to the deep canon beneath him, beheld a thing that filled him with alarm. At the bottom of the canon, the Sacramento River, here a turbulent mountain stream, and now a roaring torrent from the earlier rains of the season, fumed and foamed as it raced with the wind down the canon, hurrying on its way to its placid reaches in the plains of California. The crooked road cut into the hither slope above the high-water level of the river was not the main highway running north and south through the mountains; it served the needs of a small local traffic only. Wilder felt both surprise and apprehension to observe a light wagon driven at a furious pace down the road, flying before the storm. The incident would have been serious enough had the wagon, the two horses, and the man and woman in the wagon belonged to the mountains. The horses were of fine blood, and were unused and unsuited to the alarming situation in which they now found themselves; the wagon was too elegant and fragile for

the mountains in winter; and even at the distance that separated its occupants from Wilder, he could see that they were filled with a terror such as the mountaineers never know. The man was driving. Instead of proceeding with caution and keeping the horses perfectly in hand, he was lashing them with the whip. A man used to the mountains would never have been guilty of that folly.

It was clear that they were heading down the canon for the main road, still some miles away, by following which a little further they would arrive at a station on the railway. Pieces of luggage in the rear end of the wagon indicated that the travellers must have been spending the summer or autumn in the remoter mountains, where some beautiful lakes offered special charms to lovers of nature. Obviously their departure had been delayed until the approach of the present storm drove them hurriedly away, to be overtaken here in the canon.

The roaring of the wind, the surge of the torrential river, and, worst of all, the trees that were now crashing down, might have bewildered the steadiest head not trained to the winter savagery of the wilderness. A single tree across the road ahead might have meant disaster. Except for the little stone hut of Adrian Wilder, placed purposely to secure as great isolation as possible, and invisible from the road, there was no shelter within miles of the spot.

Presently the catastrophe came. The man, evidently seeing just ahead a tree that was swinging to its fall, shouted to the horses, and laid on the whip with added vigor, aiming to pass before the tree should fall. The horses, wholly beside themselves with terror, reared, and then plunged forward; but a moment had been lost. The horses and wagon passed under the falling tree just in time to be crushed and buried under it. The thunder of the fall echoed above the roar of the wind and the crash of more distant falling trees. Nothing of the four living things that had passed under the trap remained to Wilder’s view; they had been as completely blotted out as though they had never filled a place in the great aching world.

CHAPTER TWO

FOR a moment the young man gazed in a stupid hope that the impossible would happen,—that horses, wagon, man, and woman would emerge and continue their mad flight down the canon. Then, so completely and suddenly had all this life and activity Ceased, he wondered if the old anguish that had driven him to the solitude of the mountains was now tricking an abnormal imagination and weaving phantasms out of the storm, to torture him a moment with breathless dread, and then suppress themselves in the seeming of a tragic death. He remembered the warnings of Dr. Malbone,—he must close his mind upon the past, must find in the present only the light with which the world is filled, and must aim for a sane and useful future.

All this consumed but a moment. At once there burst upon him the awful reality of the tragedy that had worked itself out so logically before him. Humanity cried aloud within him. He sprang toward his hut, procured an axe, and plunged down the slope of the talus, taking no heed of the crude but surer trail that he had made from the road to his hut. He slipped, fell, gathered himself up, fell again, but rapidly neared his goal.

He paused when he had reached the prostrate tree. Through the branches his peering revealed a crushed, still heap. He pushed his head and shoulders within and called. There was no response.

He was at the rear of the wagon, and soon saw that it had been crushed into an indeterminate mass of wood and iron. By pushing apart the more yielding branches he brought to view the up-turned face of the man, whose eyes, fixed in death, stared horribly from a head curiously and grotesquely unshaped by the crush of the branches. The young man drew back. He gasped for breath; he called upon his self-command to bear him up in this strenuous time. He attacked the branches with his axe and cleared them away. He half wondered that the eyes of the dead remained open while they filled with particles of the bark riven by the axe. Presently the body came within reach. With unspeakable repulsion the young man placed his hand upon the stranger’s chest. There was no sign of life. Indeed, he wondered that he had taken any trouble to ascertain what he already knew.

All this time the young man’s dread and terror, heightened by a sense of utter loneliness in the presence of the dead, had driven the woman from his mind. He had not yet seen the slightest trace of her. Did he have the strength to behold a woman mangled as he had found the man... Still, they should have decent interment; that was his duty as a man. And further, it was necessary that their identity be ascertained, in order that their friends might be informed.

There was something else. Far back in the mountains, that wilder wilderness of the Trinity range, and in the Siskiyou range, beyond them, there were huge gray wolves, fierce and formidable. Now and then a daring hunter had come out of those mountains with the skin of a great gray wolf. There were old stories in the mountains that when the snow had been deep and of prolonged duration, the gray wolves came down to the tamer reaches inhabited by men, driven thither by hunger, for the game upon which they subsisted had fled before the snow to find herbage. The first to come out had been deer; soon after them had come the wolves. As the deer fell before the rifles of the settlers, the wolves had been driven to depredations on cattle and horses. There were ugly tales, too, of men attacked by them. Out of all this had grown the legend of a she-wolf that bore away children to her wolf-pack.

After the wind now raging in the mountains would come the snow, silent, deep, and implacable, to hide the work of the fallen tree below the hut; but would it hide everything so well that the great gray wolves, if driven by hunger from the remoter mountains, would fail to find what hunger required them to seek?

Wilder again attacked the tree with his axe,—another one lay dead there, and she must be found; and there was heavy and horrifying work ahead before the wind should cease and the snow begin to fall. At first the young man resumed his attack with the furious energy that had hitherto sustained his effort; but wisdom and caution came now to his aid. He realized his feebleness of mind, spirit, and body. He had devoted weeks of arduous work to the construction of his hut, and that had lent a certain strength to his muscles and buoyancy to his soul. Still, he was hardly more than a shadow of his old self, before his life had been wrecked a year ago, and he had come into the mountains to make a sturdy fight for self-mastery, for the regeneration of whatever shreds of manhood were left within him, and for their patching and binding into a fabric that should take its place in the ranks of men and work out a man’s destiny.

He went about his task with greater deliberation. He forced himself to regard with calmness the distorted dead face upturned toward him. He worked with that slowness which makes greater haste in achievement. This brought a surer judgment and an economy of effort and time. He cut the branches one by one and dragged them away.

Soon the woman’s form appeared. In the extreme moment of the catastrophe she had evidently sprung forward; this had brought her body, face downward, between the horses; they, in being crushed under the trunk of the tree, fallen across them, had nevertheless given her a certain protection; the trunk, in breaking the backs of the horses, had missed her head. As for the rest, she was so closely wedged between the horses that it would be difficult to extricate her.

This, however, was finally accomplished after great labor. The woman’s face and clothing were blood-stained. So much worse did she look than the man, that Wilder had a new struggle with himself to command courage and strength for the task. He dragged her out to a clear place in the road, and made the same perfunctory examination as in the case of the man. While he was doing so the woman moved and gasped, and this unexpected indication of life was the greatest shock of the tragedy.

But it was one of those shocks which bring new life and strength. Whereas, before he had been facing, without daring to contemplate, the awful duty that he owed the dead, here now was the most precious thing that the world then could have offered him,—here was Life, human life, fleeting, perhaps, but infinitely precious.

Wilder knelt beside the unconscious woman and with eager hands loosened her clothing. He ran to the river, dipped his handkerchief in the water, bathed her face, and removed some of the blood that covered it. He chafed her hands and wrists, anxiously watching for the slightest change. This came rapidly and progressed steadily. Removed from the crushing pressure of the horses, her chest found its natural expansion, and the rhythm of deep, slow breathing was established. Wilder had learned numerous elementary things from Dr. Malbone; he saw that, although the sufferer was so grievously hurt as to be unconscious, life was yet strong within her.

Time, then, was the precious element here. The sufferer must be taken at once to the hut, and Dr. Malbone summoned. As for the dead man, there was no present danger on his account, and the living demanded first attention.

A formidable task now confronted the young man. First, he had to bear the unconscious woman up the steep trail to the hut; then he should have to go many miles afoot to summon Dr. Malbone. The young man thought nothing of the difficulties, but all of the doing.

He was about to assail the task of getting the woman upon his shoulder, when it occurred to him that her injuries might possibly be aggravated by his manner of carrying her. He thereupon made a hasty examination. The head was bleeding. The face bore no visible injuries. The bones of the arms were whole. The left leg, however, was broken above the knee. What the particular cause of the sufferer’s unconsciousness was he could only guess. Perhaps it was merely a condition of temporary congestion, produced by the fearful pressure to which she had been subjected between the horses. A bleeding at the ears and nose seemed to the young man a bad sign.

Her condition having been thus approximately ascertained, the next problem was to bear her to the hut in a way that should do the least harm to her injuries. The first necessary thing to be done, therefore, was to prevent any mobility in the region of the fracture. To this end he burrowed again into the débris and brought forth some boards that had served as the bottom of the wagon. Tearing strips from the woman’s clothing, he bound the boards to her in a way to protect her from harm in moving her.

The strain upon his attentiveness sharpened and strengthened him in every way. He formed the whole plan of his bearing her to the hut, making her temporarily comfortable, summoning Dr. Malbone, and attending to the details of nursing her back to health.

To lift her gently upon a bowlder; to bend forward and adjust her upon his back with infinite care; to proceed with her up the laborious ascent,—all this was skilfully and expeditiously done.

Serious difficulties began soon to embarrass him. He discovered that she was above the average height and weight of women, heavier than he, although he was the taller. He found that the numerous abrupt steps in the trail laid a heavy tax upon his strength, and that some steep places proved slippery under the burden that he bore. In addition, the muscles of his arms strained and cramped; and long before he had reached the shelf upon which his hut was perched he fell to his knees a number of times from exhaustion. But the end came at last when he staggered into his hut, dragged a cover from his bed to the floor, and gently laid his burden upon it.

CHAPTER THREE

DURING all this time the fury of the storm had not abated in the least. That, indeed, had been one of the worst obstacles with which he had contended in mounting the steep to his hut. Immediately upon laying his charge on the floor he had begun to prepare his bed for the guest, but weakness from exhaustion overcame him. He reeled; a red blindness assailed him; and, in spite of a fierce effort to maintain command of his strength and faculties, he found himself plunging headlong upon his bed.

A moan recalled him to consciousness, and it was not until later that he realized the distressing length of time that he had lain unconscious. He remembered that when he fell he was very warm from the exertion of ascending the slope, and that when he awoke he was excessively cold. Furthermore, twilight had come.