_ CHAPTER XIV. LIKE ANY OTHER HERDER
The northeast wind lifted Kate's shabby riding skirt and flapped it against her horse's flank as she sat in the saddle with field glasses to her eyes looking intently at a covered wagon that was crawling over the sagebrush hummocks, its top swaying at perilous angles. She shivered unconsciously as the loose ends of her silk neckerchief fluttered and snapped in front of her and the limp brim of her Stetson blew straight against the crown of it.
"There are certainly two of them," she murmured, "and they must be lost or crazy to be wandering through the hills at this season. They had better get back to the road, if they don't want to find themselves snowed up in a draw until summer."
She replaced the glasses in the case that she wore slung by a strap over her shoulder, and looked behind her. They were undoubtedly snow clouds that the wind was driving before it from the distant mountains.
"Good thing I brought my sour-dough," she muttered as she untied the sheepskin-lined canvas coat from the back of her saddle. "We'd better sift along, Cherokee, and turn the sheep back to the bed-ground."
By the time the sheep had fed slowly back and settled themselves for the night on the gently sloping side of a draw above the sheep wagon there was just daylight enough left for her to feed and hobble the horse and cut wood without lighting a lantern. From half a mutton hanging outside at the back of the wagon she cut enough for her own supper, and fed the young collie she was training. Then, she dipped a bucket of water from the barrel, made a fire in the tiny camp stove and put on the tea kettle. She looked with distaste at a pile of soiled dishes that remained from Bowers's breakfast, and at the unmade bunk with a grimy flour sack for a pillow case.
"Thank goodness, Bowers will be back to-morrow!"
She swept the untidy floor with a stump of a broom and replaced it in its leather straps outside the wagon. When the water was heated, she washed the dishes and scoured the greasy frying pan with a bit of sagebrush, for there was no makeshift of the west with which she was not familiar. Then she made biscuits, fried bacon and a potato, and boiled coffee, eating, when the meal was ready, with the gusto of hunger.
Her hair glistened with flakes as she withdrew her head after opening the upper half of the door to throw out the dish water later.
"It's coming straight down as though it meant business," she muttered. "I'm liable to have to break trail to get them out to feed to-morrow." Then, with a look of anxiety as the thought came to her, "If they ever 'piled up' in a draw they're so fat half of them would smother."
While the fire went out she sat thinking what such a loss would mean to her--ruin, literally; and worse, for in addition she had an indebtedness to consider.
"It seems colder." She shivered, and straightening the soiled soogans, she spread her canvas coat over the grimy pillow, pulled off her riding boots and lay down with her clothes on. Before she fell asleep Kate remembered the eccentric travelers, and again wondered what possible business could bring them, but mostly she was thinking that she must not sleep soundly, although the collie was under the wagon to serve as ears for her.
While she slept, the moist featherlike flakes hardened to jagged crystals and rattled as they struck the canvas side of the wagon with a sound like gravel. The top swayed and loose belts rattled, but inside Kate lay motionless, breathing regularly in a profound and dreamless sleep. Underneath the wagon the dog rolled himself in a tighter ball and whimpered softly as the temperature lowered.
Exactly as though an unseen hand had shaken her violently, she sat bolt upright and listened. Instantly she was aware that the character of the storm had changed, but it was not that which had aroused her; it was the faint tinkle of bells which told her that the sheep were leaving the bed-ground. Her alert subconscious mind had conveyed the intelligence before even the dog heard and warned her. He now barked violently as she sprang out of bed and groped for the matches.
While she pulled on her boots, and a pair of Bowers's arctics she had noticed when sweeping, and slipped on her coat and buttoned it, the tinkle grew louder and she knew that the sheep were passing the wagon. She flung on her hat, snatched up the lantern and opened the door. The lantern flickered and she gasped when she stepped out on the wagon tongue and a blast struck her.
"I'm in for it," she said between her teeth as she ran in the direction of the bells, the dog leaping and barking vociferously beside her.
The wagon disappeared instantly, the blizzard swirled about her and the flickering lantern was only a tiny glowworm in the blackness which enveloped her. She tripped over buried sagebrush, falling frequently, picking herself up to run on, calling, urging the dog to get ahead and turn the leaders.
"Way 'round 'em, Shep! Way 'round 'em, boy!" she pleaded. But the dog, half-trained and bewildered, ran only a little way, to return and fawn upon her as though apologetic for his uselessness.
There was no thought or fear for herself in her mind as she ran--she thought only of the sheep that were drifting rapidly before the storm, now they were well started, and she could tell by the rocks rolling from above her that they were making their way out of the gulch to the flat open country.
If only she could get ahead and turn them before they split up and scattered she could perhaps hold them until morning. Was it long until morning, she wondered? Breathless, exhausted from climbing and floundering and stumbling, the full fury of the blizzard struck her when she reached the top. The driving ice particles stung her skin and eyeballs when she turned to face it, the wind carried her soothing calls from her lips as she uttered them, her skirt whipped about her as though it would soon be in ribbons, and then with a leap and a flicker the flame went out in the smoke-blackened chimney, leaving her in darkness.
There was a panic-stricken second as she stood, a single human atom in the howling white death about her but it passed quickly. She dreaded the physical suffering which experience told her would come when her body cooled and the wind penetrated her garments, yet there was no feeling of self-pity. It was all a part of the business and would come to any herder. The sheep were the chief consideration, and she never doubted but that she could endure it somehow until daylight.
"I've got to keep moving or I'll freeze solid," she told herself practically, and added between her set teeth with a grim whimsicality:
"Be a man, Kate Prentice! It's part of the price of success and you've got to pay it!"
Kate knew that hourly she was getting farther from the wagon as the sheep drifted and she followed. But daylight would bring surcease of suffering--she had only to endure and keep moving. So she stamped her feet and swung her arms, tied her handkerchief over her ears, rubbed her face with snow when absence of feeling told her it was freezing, and prayed for morning. Surely the storm was too severe to be a long one--it would slacken when daylight came, very likely, and then she could quickly get her bearings. She thought this over and over, and over and over again monotonously, while somehow the interminable hours of dumb misery passed.
Daylight! Daylight! And when the first leaden light came she was afraid to believe it. It was faint, just enough to show that somewhere the sun was shining, yet her chilled blood stirred hopefully. But there was no warmth in the dawn, the storm did not abate, and at an hour which she judged to be around nine o'clock she was able to make out only the sheep in her immediate vicinity, snow encrusted, huddled together with heads lowered, and drifting, always drifting. She had no notion where she was, and to leave the sheep was to lose them. No, she must have patience and patience and more patience. At noon it would lighten surely--it nearly always did--and she had only to hold out a little longer.
The top of the sagebrush made black dots on the white surface, and there were comparatively bare places where she dared sit down and rest a few moments, but mostly it was drifts now--drifts where she floundered and the sheep sunk down and stood stupidly until pushed forward by those behind them.
Twelve o'clock came and there was no change save that the drifts were higher and she could see a little farther into the white wilderness.
"What if--what if--" she gulped, for the thought brought a contraction of the throat muscles that made swallowing difficult. "What if there were twenty-four more of it!" Could she stand it? She was tired to exhaustion with walking, with the strain of resisting the cold, and the all-night vigil--weak, too, with hunger.
Was she to become another of those that the first chinook uncovered? One of the already large army that have paid with their lives in just such circumstances for their loyalty, or their bad judgment? After all she had gone through to reach the goal she had set for herself was she to go out like this--like a common herder who had no thought or ambition beyond the debauch when he drew his wages?
When the dimming light told her the afternoon was waning, and then indications of darkness and another night of torture, despair filled her. Numb, hungry, her vitality at low ebb, she doubted her ability to weather it. Was she being punished, she wondered, for protesting against the life the Fates appeared to have mapped out for her? Was this futile inane end coming to her because since that day when she had stood looking down upon Prouty and vowed to succeed she had fought and struggled and struck back, instead of meekly acknowledging herself crushed and beaten? Had she shaken her fist at the Almighty in so doing, when she should have bowed her head and folded her hands in resignation? She did not know; in her despair and bewilderment she lost all logic, all perspective; she knew only that in spite of the exhaustion of her body her spirit was still defiant and protesting.
She spread out her hands in supplication, raising her face to the pitiless sky while needlelike particles stung her eyeballs, and she cried despairingly:
"Oh, Uncle Joe, where are you? Is this the end of me--Katie Prentice? Is this all I was born for--just to live through heartaches and hardships, and then to drop down and die like an animal without knowing happiness or success or anything I've worked and longed and prayed for? Oh, Uncle Joe, where are you?"
The wail that the wind carried over the desert was plaintive, minor, like the cry that had reached him when she sought him in the darkness in that other crisis. She herself thought of it, but then he had responded promptly, and with the sound of his voice there had come a sense of safety and security.
She stood motionless thinking of it, the snow beating into her upturned face, the wind whipping her skirts about her. Then a feeling of exultation came to her--an exultation that was of the mind and spirit, so tangible that it sent over her a glow that was physical, creeping like a slow warm tide from her toes to the tips of her numb fingers. Even as she marveled it vanished--a curious trick of the imagination she regarded it--but it left her with a feeling of courage; inexplicably it had roused her will to a determination to fight for her life with the last ounce of her strength, and so long as there was a heart beat in her body.
The time came, however, when this moment of transport and resolution seemed so long ago that it was like some misty incident of her childhood. Her body, as when a jaded horse lashed to a gallop reaches a stage where it drops to a walk from which no amount of punishment can rouse it, was refusing to respond to the spur of her will. It became an effort to walk, to swing her arms and stamp her feet, to make any brisk movement that kept the circulation going. She knew what it portended, yet was unable to make greater resistance against the lethargy of cold and exhaustion.
The dog was still with her, close at her heels, and she pulled off her gauntlets clumsily, the act requiring a tremendous effort of will, and tried to warm her fingers in the long hair of its body; but she felt no sensation of heat and she replaced the gloves with the same effort.
The second night was full upon her now--a night so black that she could feel the storm, but not see it. At intervals she experienced a sense of detachment--as if she were a disembodied spirit, lonely, buffeted in a white hell of torture.
Usually the faint tinkle of a sheep bell recalled her, but each time the sound had less meaning for her, and the sheep seemed less and less important. She was staggering, her knees had an absurd fashion of giving way beneath her, but she could not prevent them. She was approaching the end of her endurance; she could not resist much longer--this her dull rambling brain told her over and over. And that curious phenomenon--that feeling of confidence and exultation that she had had away back--when was it? Long ago, anyhow--that had meant nothing--nothing--meant nothing. The Supreme Intelligence who had made things didn't know she existed, probably. Her coming was nothing; her going was nothing. And now she was stepping off of something--she was going down hill--down hill--the first gulch she had found in her wanderings. It was full of drifts, likely she'd stumble in one and lie there--it was tiresome to keep going, and it made no difference to anybody. Then she stumbled and fell to the bottom, prone, her arms outstretched, the briars of a wild-rose bush tearing her cheek as she lay face downward in the center of it. But she did not know it--she was comfortable, very comfortable, and she could as well lie there a little while--a little while--
Then somewhere a querulous voice was saying:
"I told you the picture would be overexposed when you were takin' it. You'll never listen to me."
A deeper voice answered:
"The light was stronger than I thought; but, anyway, it's a humdinger of a negative." Then, sharply, "Sh-ss-sh! What was that, Honey?"
A silence fell instantly.
"Honey!" Kate had a notion that she smiled, though her white face did not alter its expression. Her tongue moved thickly, "I like that name, Hughie."
Her collie whimpered and scratched again at the door of the wagon. The traveling photographer pushed it open and the animal sprang inside, leaping from one to the other in his gratitude.
"It's a sheep dog!" the man cried in consternation. "There's a herder lost somewhere."
"Can we do anything--such a night?" the old woman asked doubtfully. "Can anyone be alive in it?"
"Light the lantern--quick! Maybe I can track the dog back before the snow fills them. He might be down within a stone's throw of the wagon." Snatching the lantern from her hand he admonished his wife as he stepped out into the wilderness:
"You-all keep hollerin' so I can hear you. I kin git lost mighty easy."
The light became a blur almost instantly, but he was not fifty feet from the wagon when he shouted:
"I got him!" Then--his voice shrilled in astonishment--"Sufferin' Saints! It's a woman!" _