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Snow swirled down the cliffs, plastering rocks and ledges until both footholds and handholds were hidden. Still I had to go down, there was nothing else to do. The hardy sheep, with their heavy coats, could wait out the storm. But night, with numbing cold, and treacherous darkness in which I'd dare not move, would soon o'ertake and vanquish me. For an hour the ledges provided footing.
Raising both hands again the medic brought them down, curling inward, until he stooped and touched them to the ground. When he straightened once again the knife was in his grasp and he tossed it behind him. The smoke from the fire swirled out in a long tongue, coiled about Lumbrilo and was gone.
The climb was so precipitous that it was hours before he could reach the summit, and he was yet some miles from being half way when his well-trained eye caught indications of coming disaster. A thousand trivial things announced that a mountain storm was brewing; the clouds trailed themselves into long, leaden ribbons, then swirled in circles like whirlpools.
Suddenly it trembled, swirled, and rushed forward to meet the oncoming dust-cloud as though drawn toward it by the suck of a mighty vortex. "Dat better we gon' for hont de hole. Dat dust sto'm she raise hell." "Hole up, nothin'!" cried the Texan; "How are we goin' to hole up four of us an' five horses, on a pint of water an' three cans of tomatoes? When that storm hits it's goin' to be hot.
I cried to him, as the water swirled about our waist. "Go back!" And so I sprang in alone and left him. For the time I could make small headway, indeed, had not time to get at the oars, but pushing as I might with the first thing that came to hand, I felt the bottom under me, felt again the lift of the sea carry me out of touch.
The heat from the prairie fire was most oppressive. Over their heads the hot smoke swirled, shutting out all sight of the stars. Now and then a clump of brush beside the trail broke into flame again, fanned by the wind, and the ponies snorted and leaped aside. Suddenly Mack was heard yelling at the mules and trying to pull them down to something milder than a wild gallop.
Quite close to him a dead branch thrust upwards from the water, and the river swirled in oily play of wrinkles and dimples beyond it. Here, with some approach to his old skill, the angler presently cast a small brown moth. It fell lightly and neatly, cocked for a second, then turned helplessly over, wrecked in the sudden eddy as a natural insect had been.
"Taste like milk to me," he said. "Smell it," Johnny ordered. Peterson sniffed. "O.K., now do the same things to the other buckets." Peterson swished the ladle through the buckets containing Sally's milk. The white liquid swirled sluggishly and oillike. He bent over and smelled and made a grimace. "Go on," Johnny demanded, "taste it." Peterson took a tiny sip, tasted and then spat.
A mile ahead the turbid waters churned and slopped over the sand bar, forming a sluggish but powerful eddy across half the river's breadth. Pieces of rotten wood and heaped masses of forest grasses swirled into a floating tangle in the lee of the bar.
But Elizabeth gave him her hand rather timidly and without looking at him. This time there was no backward glance as Malcolm and his lantern disappeared into the dark woodlands; but Elizabeth stood so long in the porch that the dead leaves swirled round her feet and even blew across the hall. "I wish I had not said that," she thought; "I might have trusted him.
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