Masters of the Wheat-Lands. Harold Bindloss
round through the bluff.”
He got down, and though the bags were heavy, with Sally’s assistance he managed to hoist the first of them on to his shoulders. Then he staggered with it up the steep foot-trail that climbed the slope. He was more or less accustomed to carrying bags of grain between store and wagon, but his mittened hands were numbed, and his joints were stiff with cold. Sally noticed that he floundered rather wildly. In another moment or two, however, he vanished into the gloom among the trees, and she sat listening to the uneven crunch of his footsteps in the snow, until there was a sudden crash of broken branches, and a sound as of something falling heavily down a declivity. Then there was another crash, and stillness again.
Sally gasped, and clenched her mittened hands hard upon the reins as she remembered that Lorton’s by-trail skirted the edge of a very steep bank, but she lost neither her collectedness nor her nerve. Presence of mind in the face of an emergency is probably as much a question of experience as of temperament, and, like other women in that country, she had seen men struck down by half-trained horses, crushed by collapsing strawpiles, and once or twice gashed by mower blades. This was no doubt why she remembered that the impatient team would probably move on if she left the sleigh, and therefore drove the horses to the first of the birches before she got down. Then she knotted the reins about a branch, and called out sharply.
No answer came out of the shadows, and her heart beat unpleasantly fast as she plunged in among the trees, keeping below the narrow trail that went slanting up the side of the declivity, until she stopped, with another gasp, when she reached a spot where a ray of moonlight filtered down. A limp figure in an old skin coat lay almost at her feet, and she dropped on her knees beside it in the snow. Hawtrey’s face showed an unpleasant grayish-white in the faint silvery light.
“Gregory,” she cried hoarsely.
The man opened his eyes, and blinked at her in a half-dazed manner. “Fell down,” he said. “Think I felt my leg go—and my side’s stabbing me. Go for somebody.”
Sally glanced round, and noticed that the grain bag lay burst open not far away. She fancied that he had clung to it after he lost his footing, which explained why he had fallen so heavily, but that was not a point of any consequence now. There was nobody who could help her within two leagues of the spot, and it was evident that she could not leave him there to freeze. Then she noticed that the trees grew rather farther apart just there, and rising swiftly she ran back to bring the team. The ascent was steep, and she had to urge the horses, with sharp cries and blows from her mittened hand, among shadowy tree trunks and through snapping undergrowth before she reached the spot where Hawtrey lay. He looked up at her when at last the horses stood close beside him.
“You can’t turn them here,” he told her faintly.
Sally was never sure how she managed it, for the sleigh drove against the slender trunks, and the fiery beasts, terrified by the snapping of the undergrowth, were almost unmanageable; but at last they were facing the descent again, and she stooped and twined her arms about the shoulders of Hawtrey, who now lay almost against the sleigh.
“It’s going to hurt, Gregory, but I have got to get you in,” she warned him.
Then she gasped, for Hawtrey was a man of full stature, and it was a heavy lift. She could not raise him wholly, and he cried out once when his injured leg trailed in the snow. Still, with the most strenuous effort she had ever made she moved him a yard or so, and then staggering fell with her side against the sleigh. She felt faint with the pain of it, but with another desperate lift she drew him into the sleigh, and let him sink down gently upon the bag that still lay there. His eyes had shut again, and he said nothing now.
It required only another moment or two to wrap the thick driving-robe about him, and after that, with one hand still beneath his neck, she glanced down. It was clear that he was quite unconscious of her presence, and stooping swiftly she kissed his gray face. She settled herself in the driving-seat with only a blanket coat to shelter her from the cold, and the horses went cautiously down the slope. She did not urge them until they reached the level, for the trail that wound up out of the ravine was difficult, but when the wide white expanse once more stretched away before them she laid the biting whip across their backs.
That was quite sufficient. They were fiery animals, and when they broke into a furious gallop the rush of night wind struck her tingling cheeks like a lash of wires. All power of feeling went out of her hands, her arms grew stiff and heavy, and she was glad that the trail led smooth and straight to the horizon. Hawtrey, who had moved a little, lay helpless across her feet. He did not answer when she spoke to him.
The team went far at the gallop. A fine mist of snow beat against the sleigh, but the girl leaning forward, a tense figure, with nerveless hands clenched upon the reins, saw nothing but the blue-gray riband of trail that steadily unrolled itself before her. At length a blurred mass, which she knew to be a birch bluff, grew out of the white waste, and presently a cluster of darker smudges shot up into the shape of a log-house, sod stables, and straw-pile granary. A minute or two later, she pulled the team up with an effort, and a man, who flung the door of the house open, came out into the moonlight. He stopped, and gazed at her in astonishment.
“Miss Creighton!” he said.
“Don’t stand there,” cried Sally. “Take the near horse’s head, and lead them right up to the door.”
“What’s the matter?” the man asked stupidly.
“Lead the team up,” ordered Sally. “Jump, if you can.”
It was supposed that Sproatly had never moved with much expedition in his life, but that night he sprang towards the horses at a commanding wave of the girl’s hand. He started when he saw his comrade lying in the bottom of the sleigh, but Sally disregarded his hurried questions.
“Help me to get him out,” she said, when he stopped the team. “Keep his right leg as straight as you can. I don’t want to lift him. We must slide him in.”
They did it somehow, though the girl was breathless before their task was finished, and the perspiration started from the man. Then Sally turned to Sproatly.
“Get into the sleigh, and don’t spare the team,” she said. “Drive over to Watson’s, and bring him along. You can tell him your partner’s broke his leg, and some of his ribs. Start right now!”
Sproatly did her bidding, and when the door closed behind him she flung off her blanket coat and thrust plenty of wood into the stove. She looked for some coffee in the cupboard, and put on a kettle, after which she sat down on the floor by Hawtrey’s side. He lay still, with the thick driving-robe beneath him, and though the color was creeping back into his face, his eyes were shut, and he was apparently quite unconscious of her presence. For the first time she was aware of a distressful faintness, which, as she had come suddenly out of the stinging frost into the little overheated room that reeked with tobacco smoke and a stale smell of cooking, was not astonishing. She mastered her dizziness, however, and presently, seeing that Hawtrey did not move, glanced about her with some curiosity, for it was the first time she had entered his house.
The room was scantily furnished, and, though very few of the bachelor farmers in that country live luxuriously, she fancied that Sproatly, who had evidently very rudimentary ideas on the subject of house-cleaning, had not brought back all the sundries he had thrown out into the snow. It contained a table, a carpenter’s bench, and a couple of chairs. There were still smears of dust upon the uncovered floor. The birch-log walls had been rudely paneled half-way up, but the half-seasoned boards had cracked with the heat, and exuded streaks of resin to which the grime and dust had clung. A pail, which contained potato peelings, stood amid a litter of old long-boots and broken harness against one wall. The floor was black and thick with grease all round the rusty stove. A pile of unwashed dishes and cooking utensils stood upon the table, and the lamp above her head had blackened the boarded ceiling.
Sally noticed it all with disgust, and then, seeing that Hawtrey had opened his eyes, she made a cup of coffee and persuaded him to drink it. After that he smiled at her.
“Thanks,”