Page:The Best Continental Short Stories of 1923–1924.djvu/56



EACEFULLY, endlessly, snow was falling on the frozen countryside. “Silence always falls with the snow,” reflected Boura, who had taken shelter in a shed.

His isolation amid the vastness of nature made him feel both sad and solemn. So far as his eye could see, the earth was becoming simplified, unified, amplified, ordered into a succession of great white waves. It was unseared by the confused furrows of life. At first, the only movement in this universal silence, the downward fluttering of the snow flakes, grew slower, rarer, and ceased altogether. Timidly the wayfarer trod on the virgin snow, and felt it was strange he should be the first to mark a line of steps on the white expanse. Some one, however, is passing along the main road, a black, snow-spotted figure, walking in the opposite direction. There will be two lines of footprints now, running parallel, then crossing and bringing to this pure, unsullied place the first troubling mark of man.

The oncomer stops, his beard clotted with snow; he is contemplating attentively something over there, by the side of the road.

Boura slowed down and turned searching looks in the same direction; the two lines of footprints meet and stop side by side.

“Do you see that imprint over yonder?” the man asked, pointing to a footprint some six yards from the road they were both standing on.

“Perfectly. It is the footprint of a man.”

“Quite. But where the devil does it come from?”

“Suppose some one must have gone by there,” Boura was going to say, but he stopped, puzzled. The imprint was isolated in the middle of a field; there was no other before or behind; it was a sharp imprint on the white surface of the snow, but no footsteps led either to or from it.