The first day of his flight went by well enough. The second day it ceased to be a joke. The third day, hard pressed on two sides, he became a criminal in fact as well as in theory by stealing a horse, even though he left behind him the worn-out gray of twice the value of the animal he took in exchange. The law had no time to waste on such trifles as this. The point was that he now rode on property that was not his. The written law of the land would send him to prison for the act, and the unwritten law of the Southwest would hang him for the same reason.
It was on the third night that he decided that the trail southward was growing entirely too hot for him. The trouble was that they knew exactly what his goal was. 200 miles away flowed the Río Grande, but every mile of the 200 would be policed with men ready to shoot to kill.
There was another border to the north, ten times as far away, but, since his pursuers never dreamed that he would strike in that direction, he might safely reach it. So that night he turned his pinto north and west and rode like mad for the railroad. Before dawn he was beside the tracks. In the gray of the early morning light he was lying stretched on the rods of a thundering freight that shot him northward, covering a day’s ride for a horse in the space of a single hour.
Yet all was not smooth on that trip to the Northland. By no means! Before it ended, he knew the hardness of the fists of a brakeman, and many a shack knew the hardness of the quick fists of Jack Trainor. He knew other things, also, but, at the end of ten days of fighting and starving and freezing, with the bitter weather biting him more and more, he found himself at length flung from a speeding train that was roaring through a mountain pass.
He turned a dozen somersaults when he struck the ground, but he sat up, sound in body and bone, although sadly bruised. And then he watched the train thunder away out of view down the pass. He was left alone, half frozen, with the cold of an early winter night numbing his body, and the Canadian Rockies soaring up on every side toward the cold shining of the stars. And never in his life had he felt such loneliness, such a sense of utter helplessness. To him, home meant the wide silence of the desert with hills rolling softly against the horizon. Such monster forest trees as those that marched in ragged ranks up these mountainsides were almost like human beings to Jack Trainor.
Yet, he must trust to fortune to strike through those same dark and forbidding trees and attempt to find food, for he was desperately hungry. Thirty-six hours of exposure without food of any kind gave him the appetite of a wolf, and like a wolf he stalked up the slope among the trees, bent on finding game.
A rising moon made the cold visible, so to speak, and gave it teeth to pierce to the very heart of the scantily clad cowpuncher. He trudged on up hill and down dale, feeling that, if he paused, the cold would numb his muscles so that they could not be used. And yet there was no sign of life before him or on any side.
The white moonshine was displaced by an ugly dawn, for no sooner did the sun show its edge than the sky was covered by a mass of clouds driving rapidly before the wind, and the day came up dim with the storm howling through the trees. A sort of madness came on Trainor. He had put many a long mile behind him, and now he decided that there was no chance of coming across the habitation of man in this direction, for he had reached not the slightest sign of a trail in all the distance he had covered. Therefore, he determined to turn back toward the tracks. Only madness could have given him that determination, for he was long past the point where he had sufficient strength to bring him to the spot from which he started during the night. Moreover, even if he wished to get back, that was now becoming increasingly difficult, for whirls of snow began to appear on the wind, blowing through the branches above him softly, and spotting the solid black of the evergreens with white. This fall of snow was quickly transformed into such a downpouring as he had never dreamed of in his southland. It was like the descent of a myriad of gigantic moths flying down on noiseless wings and piling up on the ground.
Before an hour passed he was staggering through drifts knee high, where the wind had whipped and piled them on the edges of the open places. The air in front of him was filled with white. His senses began to reel; long since, he had lost all sense of direction. In fact, he had reached that point at which many a man would have given up, but pride kept him going. He could not admit defeat, no matter to what extreme he were pushed, and, just as he would have fought a human enemy to the bitter end, so he fought on mutely against weariness, cold, and devastating hunger.
Once he stumbled. He roused himself later to find that he had fallen into a profound sleep. And he was numb to the elbows and the knees. He got up and beat the circulation back in a frenzy, and then rushed blindly ahead, for he knew that, if he paused once again to rest in that fashion, the exhaustion of nearly three days without sleep would, combined with the cold, destroy him.
But now he found that his senses were swimming. He could not distinguish the way that he kept. Sometimes, he crashed into the trunks of trees. Sometimes, when he hooked an arm across his face to protect himself from the thicket that he seemed about to plunge into, he found that there was nothing but empty air and the rushing of the snow before him.
Every step he was taking now was straight away from the railroad. Indeed, ever since he started, save for a brief half hour, he had been working on a line due north from the tracks. And now a mere chance floored him, so greatly was he reduced. He slipped on a stone under the lee of a great tree, struck his head violently against the trunk, and collapsed to the ground. Had he possessed a tithe of his ordinary strength, he would not have minded that fall and blow on the head at all, but in his present condition of exhaustion it was enough to throw him into the deep oblivion of senselessness.
He was roused from that senselessness as from a profound sleep by a huge voice that called to him out of an immense distance. He smiled and shook his head. It seemed to him that someone was calling to him to get up and start a day’s work in the pitiless cold of the world—someone was asking him to leave a cozy bed.
But the voice thundered over him again. He felt himself being shaken. Cruelly he was wrenched to his feet. He was beaten and thumped, and ever that immense voice roared at him. Then suddenly the veil dropped from his eyes, and he beheld himself standing in the midst of a forest full of blowing snow with a monstrous man looming above him, pommeling him with one fist while with the other arm he held him erect, and all the while shouting to him to make him regain his senses.
That glimpse of the startling truth ended in a mist of blackness again, and he crumpled into a deep sleep once more. But, just before the sleep came on, he felt himself lifted and pitched over the shoulder of the stranger.
It seemed to him that a nightmare journey began. Sometimes, he was enduring another of those beatings. Again, he was being carried on by the giant, althoughthis was obviously folly. What man was large enough to carry him through such a bitter storm as this, while the wind plucked at them and swung them back and forth?
After that a longer sleep ensued, and it was broken, at length, with a sense of burning in his throat and burning, also, of his feet and his face and his hands. He opened his eyes and looked up. Brandy had been poured down his throat. He was swathed in hot blankets. He was lying beside a red-hot stove. Then, as his senses cleared still further, he saw above him the strange giant of the storm, black-bearded, with bright, bright eyes, rosy cheeks, and a tangle of uncombed hair. Out of his throat issued a great roar, that familiar voice of his dreams: “Hello…hello…hello!”