United States or Malaysia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Dogs could not be had for love or money, and they set out on snowshoes with two weeks' supply of provisions, striking south and west. The remainder of that day and the next they traveled with but little rest. Each hour that passed added to Billy's mad impatience to reach McTabb's cabin.
And then, as he staggered another step back toward the wall, he held out his ragged arms, without knowing what he was doing, and called her name as he had spoken it a hundred times at night beside his lonely campfires. Starvation, his injury, weeks of illness, and his almost superhuman struggle to reach McTabb's cabin, and after that civilization, had consumed his last strength.
He rose silently to his feet and stood for a few moments as motionless as a statue over the grave. Then he turned and went back over the old trail, and from the edge of the clearing he looked back and whispered to himself and to her: "I'll come back for you, Isobel. I'll come back." At McTabb's cabin he had left his pack. He put the straps over his shoulder and started south again.
McTabb had quit the Service because of a bad leg. "Rookie!" he gasped. He drew himself up, and McTabb's hands grasped his shoulders. "S'help me, if it ain't Billy MacVeigh!" he exclaimed again, amazement in his voice and face. "Joe brought you in five minutes ago, and I ain't had a straight squint at you until now. Billy MacVeigh!
It was late in the afternoon of a day that had been filled with sunlight and the warmth of spring that he came to the Little Beaver, a short distance above McTabb's cabin. He almost ran from there to the clearing, and the sun was just sinking behind the forest in the west when he paused on the edge of the break in the forest and saw the cabin. It was from here that he had last seen little Isobel.
At times there possessed him an overwhelming desire to return to McTabb's cabin and find where they had gone. But he fought against this desire as a man fights against death. He knew that once he surrendered himself to the temptation to be near her again he would lose much that he had won in his struggle during the days of plague in Couchée's cabin.
With return of health and strength Billy's impatience to reach McTabb's cabin grew hourly. He would have set out before his hip was in condition to travel had not Mukoki kept him back. At last the day came when he bade his forest friends good-by and started into the south.
Before I have another I want to tell you what I'm up against, Rookie. My Gawd, it's a funny chance that ran me up against you just in time! Listen." He told McTabb briefly of Scottie Deane's death, of Couchée's flight from the cabin, and the present situation there. "There isn't a minute to lose," he finished, tightening his hold on McTabb's hand.
On the third and the fifth and the seventh days he went over to McTabb's cabin, and Rookie came out and talked with him at a distance through a birchbark megaphone. On the seventh day there was still no news of Indian Joe and his mother. And on this day Billy played his last part as Deane.
Word Of The Day