Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/363

Rh the ice, where there was little snow, he could travel for long stretches faster than she; she struggled to keep even with him, her lungs seared by the cold air as she gasped for breath. But she could not rest; she could not let herself be exhausted. Merciless minute after minute she raced him thus— A dark shape—a figure lay stretched upon the ice ahead! Beyond and still farther out, something which seemed the fragments of a lifeboat tossed up and down where the waves thundered and gleamed at the edge of the floe.

Henry's pace quickened; hers quickened desperately too. She left the shelter of the trees and scrambled down the steep pitch of the bluff, shouting, crying aloud. Henry turned about and saw her; he halted, and she passed him with a rush and got between him and the form upon the ice, before she turned and faced him.

Defeat—defeat of whatever frightful purpose he had had—was his now that she was there to witness what he might do; and in his realization of that, he burst out in oaths against her— He advanced; she stood, confronting—he swayed slightly in his walk and swung past her and away; he went past those things on the beach and kept on along the ice hummocks toward the north.

She ran to the huddled figure of the man in mackinaw and cap; his face was hidden partly by the position in which he lay and partly by the drifting snow; but, before she swept the snow away and turned him to her, she knew that he was Alan.

She cried to him and, when he did not answer, she shook him to get him awake; but she could not rouse him. Praying in wild whispers to herself, she opened