He broke off helplessly. The inevitableness of the situation was growing.
"Can I make Deep Lake to-night?" Frona asked, forgetting herself to sympathize with him, then becoming conscious of what she was doing and bursting into laughter.
"But you couldn't ford the river in the dark." He frowned at her levity. "And there are no camps between."
"Are you afraid?" she asked with just the shadow of a sneer.
"Not for myself."
"Well, then, I think I'll go to bed."
"I might sit up and keep the fire going," he suggested after a pause.
"Fiddlesticks!" she cried. "As though your foolish little code were saved in the least! We are not in civilization. This is the trail to the Pole. Go to bed."
He elevated his shoulders in token of surrender. "Agreed. What shall
I do then?"
"Help me make my bed, of course. Sacks laid crosswise! Thank you, sir, but I have bones and muscles that rebel. Here— Pull them around this way."
Under her direction he laid the sacks lengthwise in a double row. This left an uncomfortable hollow with lumpy sack-corners down the middle; but she smote them flat with the side of the axe, and in the same manner lessened the slope to the walls of the hollow. Then she made a triple longitudinal fold in a blanket and spread it along the bottom of the long depression.
"Hum!" he soliloquized. "Now I see why I sleep so badly. Here goes!"
And he speedily flung his own sacks into shape.
"It is plain you are unused to the trail," she informed him, spreading the topmost blanket and sitting down.
"Perhaps so," he made answer. "But what do you know about this trail life?" he growled a little later.
"Enough to conform," she rejoined equivocally, pulling out the dried wood from the oven and replacing it with wet.
"Listen to it! How it storms!" he exclaimed. "It's growing worse, if worse be possible."
The tent reeled under the blows of the wind, the canvas booming hollowly at every shock, while the sleet and rain rattled overhead like skirmish-fire grown into a battle. In the lulls they could hear the water streaming off at the side-walls with the noise of small cataracts. He reached up curiously and touched the wet roof. A burst of water followed instantly at the point of contact and coursed down upon the grub-box.
"You mustn't do that!" Frona cried, springing to her feet. She put her finger on the spot, and, pressing tightly against the canvas, ran it down to the side-wall. The leak at once stopped. "You mustn't do it, you know," she reproved.
"Jove!" was his reply. "And you came through from Dyea to-day! Aren't you stiff?"
"Quite a bit," she confessed, candidly, "and sleepy."
"Good-night," she called to him several minutes later, stretching her body luxuriously in the warm blankets. And a quarter of an hour after that, "Oh, I say! Are you awake?"
"Yes," his voice came muffled across the stove. "What is it?"
"Have you the shavings cut?"
"Shavings?" he queried, sleepily. "What shavings?"
"For the fire in the morning, of course. So get up and cut them."
He obeyed without a word; but ere he was done she had ceased to hear him.
The ubiquitous bacon was abroad on the air when she opened her eyes. Day had broken, and with it the storm. The wet sun was shining cheerily over the drenched landscape and in at the wide-spread flaps. Already work had begun, and groups of men were filing past under their packs. Frona turned over on her side. Breakfast was cooked. Her host had just put the bacon and fried potatoes in the oven, and was engaged in propping the door ajar with two sticks of firewood.
"Good-morning," she greeted.
"And good-morning to you," he responded, rising to his feet and picking up the water-bucket. "I don't hope that you slept well, for I know you did."
Frona laughed.
"I'm going out after some water," he vouchsafed. "And when I return I shall expect you ready for breakfast."
After breakfast, basking herself in the sun, Frona descried a familiar bunch of men rounding the tail of the glacier in the direction of Crater Lake . She clapped her hands.
"There comes my outfit, and Del Bishop as shame-faced as can be, I'm sure, at his failure to connect." Turning to the man, and at the same time slinging camera and satchel over her shoulder, "So I must say good-by, not forgetting to thank you for your kindness."
"Oh, not at all, not at all. Pray don't mention it. I'd do the same for any—"
"Vaudeville artist!"
He looked his reproach, but went on. "I don't know your name, nor do I wish to know it."
"Well, I shall not be so harsh, for I do know your name, MISTER VANCE CORLISS! I saw it on the shipping tags, of course," she explained. "And I want you to come and see me when you get to Dawson . My name is Frona Welse. Good-by."
"Your father is not Jacob Welse?" he called after her as she ran lightly down towards the trail.
She turned her head and nodded.
But Del Bishop was not shamefaced, nor even worried. "Trust a Welse to land on their feet on a soft spot," he had consoled himself as he dropped off to sleep the night before. But he was angry—"madder 'n hops," in his own vernacular.
"Good-mornin'," he saluted. "And it's plain by your face you had a comfortable night of it, and no thanks to me."
"You weren't worried, were you?" she asked.
"Worried? About a Welse? Who? Me? Not on your life. I was too busy tellin' Crater Lake what I thought of it. I don't like the water. I told you so. And it's always playin' me scurvy—not that I'm afraid of it, though."
"Hey, you Pete!" turning to the Indians. "Hit 'er up! Got to make Linderman by noon!"
"Frona Welse?" Vance Corliss was repeating to himself.
The whole thing seemed a dream, and he reassured himself by turning and looking after her retreating form. Del Bishop and the Indians were already out of sight behind a wall of rock. Frona was just rounding the base. The sun was full upon her, and she stood out radiantly against the black shadow of the wall beyond. She waved her alpenstock, and as he doffed his cap, rounded the brink and disappeared.
CHAPTER V
The position occupied by Jacob Welse was certainly an anomalous one. He was a giant trader in a country without commerce, a ripened product of the nineteenth century flourishing in a society as primitive as that of the Mediterranean vandals. A captain of industry and a splendid monopolist, he dominated the most independent aggregate of men ever drawn together from the ends of the earth. An economic missionary, a commercial St. Paul , he preached the doctrines of expediency and force. Believing in the natural rights of man, a child himself of democracy, he bent all men to his absolutism. Government of Jacob Welse, for Jacob Welse and the people, by Jacob Welse, was his unwritten gospel. Single-handed he had carved out his dominion till he gripped the domain of a dozen Roman provinces. At his ukase the population ebbed and flowed over a hundred thousand miles of territory, and cities sprang up or disappeared at his bidding.
Yet he was a common man. The air of the world first smote his lungs on the open prairie by the River Platte, the blue sky over head, and beneath, the green grass of the earth pressing against his tender nakedness. On the horses his eyes first opened, still saddled and gazing in mild wonder on the miracle; for his trapper father had but turned aside from the trail that the wife might have quiet and the birth be accomplished. An hour or so and the two, which were now three, were in the saddle and overhauling their trapper comrades. The party had not been delayed; no time lost. In the morning his mother cooked the breakfast over the camp-fire, and capped it with a fifty-mile ride into the next sun-down.