Essential Novelists - Bret Harte. Bret Harte

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      He knew now whence the duck had flown! He knew now why he had not seen the watercourse before! He knew now where the birds and beasts had betaken themselves—why the woods and cañons were trackless! Here was at last the open road! He staggered to his feet with a cry of delight.

      "Grace, we are saved."

      Grace looked at him with eyes that perhaps spoke more eloquently of joy at his recovery than of comprehension of his delight.

      "Look, Grace! this is Nature's own road—only a lane, perhaps—but a clue to our way out of this wilderness. As we descend the stream it will open into a broader valley."

      "I know it," she said, simply.

      Philip looked at her inquiringly.

      "When I dragged you out of the way of the falling rocks and snow above, I had a glimpse of the valley you speak of. I saw it from there."

      She pointed to a ledge of rock above the opening where the great stone that had fallen had lodged.

      "When you dragged me, my child?"

      Grace smiled faintly.

      "You don't know how strong I am," she said, and then proved it by fainting dead away.

      Philip started to his feet and ran to her side. Then he felt for the precious flask that he had preserved so sacredly through all their hardships, but it was gone. He glanced around him; it was lying on the snow, empty! For the first time in their weary pilgrimage Philip uttered a groan. At the sound Grace opened her sweet eyes. She saw her lover with the empty flask in his hand, and smiled faintly.

      "I poured it all down your throat, dear," she said. "You looked so faint—I thought you were dying—forgive me!"

      "But I was only stunned; and you, Grace, you"——

      "Am better now," she said, as she strove to rise. But she uttered a weak little cry and fell back again.

      Philip did not hear her. He was already climbing the ledge she had spoken of. When he returned his face was joyous.

      "I see it, Grace; it is only a few miles away. It is still light, and we shall camp there to-night."

      "I am afraid—not—dear Philip," said Grace, doubtfully.

      "Why not?" asked Philip, a little impatiently.

      "Because—I—think—my leg is broken!"

      "Grace!"

      But she had fainted.

      CHAPTER V. OUT OF THE WOODS—INTO THE SHADOW.

      Happily Grace was wrong. Her ankle was severely sprained, and she could not stand. Philip tore up his shirt, and, with bandages dipped in snow water, wrapped up the swollen limb. Then he knocked over a quail in the bushes and another duck, and clearing away the brush for a camping spot, built a fire, and tempted the young girl with a hot supper. The peril of starvation passed, their greatest danger was over—a few days longer of enforced rest and inactivity was the worst to be feared.

      The air had grown singularly milder with the last few hours. At midnight a damp breeze stirred the pine needles above their heads, and an ominous muffled beating was heard upon the snow-packed vault. It was rain.

      "It is the reveille of spring!" whispered Philip.

      But Grace was in no mood for poetry—even a lover's. She let her head drop upon his shoulder, and then said—

      "You must go on, dear, and leave me here."

      "Grace!"

      "Yes, Philip! I can live till you come back. I fear no danger now. I am so much better off than they are!"

      A few tears dropped on his hand. Philip winced. Perhaps it was his conscience; perhaps there was something in the girl's tone, perhaps because she had once before spoken in the same way, but it jarred upon a certain quality in his nature which he was pleased to call his "common sense." Philip really believed himself a high-souled, thoughtless, ardent, impetuous temperament, saved only from destruction by the occasional dominance of this quality.

      For a moment he did not speak. He thought how, at the risk of his own safety, he had snatched this girl from terrible death; he thought how he had guarded her through their perilous journey, taking all the burdens upon himself; he thought how happy he had made her—how she had even admitted her happiness to him; he thought of her present helplessness, and how willing he was to delay the journey on her account; he dwelt even upon a certain mysterious, ill-defined but blissful future with him to which he was taking her; and yet here, at the moment of their possible deliverance, she was fretting about two dying people, who, without miraculous interference, would be dead before she could reach them. It was part of Philip's equitable self-examination—a fact of which he was very proud—that he always put himself in the position of the person with whom he differed, and imagined how he would act under the like circumstances. Perhaps it is hardly necessary to say that Philip always found that his conduct under those conditions would be totally different. In the present instance, putting himself in Grace's position, he felt that he would have abandoned all and everything for a love and future like hers. That she did not was evidence of a moral deficiency or a blood taint. Logic of this kind is easy and irrefutable. It has been known to obtain even beyond the Sierras, and with people who were not physically exhausted. After a pause he said to Grace, in a changed voice—

      "Let us talk plainly for a few moments, Grace, and understand each other before we go forward or backward. It is five days since we left the hut; were we even certain of finding our wandering way back again, we could not reach them before another five days had elapsed; by that time all will be over. They have either been saved or are beyond the reach of help. This sounds harsh, Grace, but it is no harsher than the fact. Had we stayed, we would, without helping them, have only shared their fate. I might have been in your brother's place, you in your sister's. It is our fortune, not our fault, that we are not dying with them. It has been willed that you and I should be saved. It might have been willed that we should have perished in our attempts to succour them, and that relief which came to them would have never reached us."

      Grace was no logician, and could not help thinking that if Philip had said this before, she would not have left the hut. But the masculine reader will, I trust, at once detect the irrelevance of the feminine suggestion, and observe that it did not refute Philip's argument. She looked at him with a half frightened air. Perhaps it was the tears that dimmed her eyes, but his few words seemed to have removed him to a great distance, and for the first time a strange sense of loneliness came over her. She longed to reach her yearning arms to him again, but with this feeling came a sense of shame that she had not felt before.

      Philip noticed her hesitation, and half interpreted it. He let her passive head fall.

      "Perhaps we had better wait until we are ourselves out of danger before we talk of helping others," he said with something of his old bitterness. "This accident may keep us here some days, and we know not as yet where we are. Go to sleep now," he said more kindly, "and in the СКАЧАТЬ