Slowly, with long pauses between each movement, and taking care not to
place his dark body against the white snow, Reivers dragged himself
around to a hiding-place behind the boulder against which he had slept.
The sun had risen higher now. Its rays were lighting the valley, and as
he peered avidly around one side of the stone, Reivers could make out
some detail of the two specks that moved so steadily toward him.
It was a four-dog team, travelling rapidly, and the man, on snow-shoes,
travelled beside his team and plied his whip as he strode. Reivers’
brows drew down in puzzled fashion. The sledge which whirled behind the
running dogs seemed flat and unloaded; the dogs ran in a fashion that
told they were strong and fresh. Why didn’t the man ride?
Reivers drew back to take stock of the situation. The man might be a
stranger, travelling hurriedly through the Dead Lands, or he might be
one of the men from Cameron-Dam Camp. If the former, food might be had
for a mere hail and the asking; if the latter—Reivers’s nostrils widened
and he smiled.
Yet a third possibility existed. The man was travelling in strange
fashion, running beside an apparently empty sled, and whipping his dogs
along. So did men travel when they were fleeing from various reasons,
and men fleeing thus do not go unarmed nor take kindly to having the
trail of their flight witnessed by casual though starving strangers.
Thus there was one chance that a hail and plea for food would be met
with a friendly response; two chances that they would be met with lead
or steel.
Reivers, not being a careless man, looked about for ways and means to
place the odds in his favour. A hundred yards to the north of him the
valley narrowed into a mere slit between two straight walls of rock.
Through this gap the traveller must pass.
When Reivers had crawled to a position on the rock directly above the
narrow opening, he lay flat down and grinned in peace. He was securely
hidden, and the dog-driver would pass unsuspectingly, unready, thirty
feet beneath where he lay. Things were looking well.
The driver and team came on at a steady pace. Even at a great distance,
his stride betrayed his race and Reivers muttered, “White man,” and
pushed to the edge of the bluff a huge, jagged piece of rock. The man
might not listen to reason, and Reivers was taking no chances of
allowing an opportunity to feed to slip by.
The sleigh still puzzled him. As it came nearer and nearer he saw that
it was not empty. Something long and flat lay upon it. Reivers ceased to
watch the driver and turned his scrutiny entirely to the bundle upon the
sleigh. Minute after minute he watched the sleigh to the exclusion of
everything else.
He made out eventually that the bundle was the size and form of a human
body. Soon he saw that it moved now and then, as if struggling to rise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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