He looked at her with a wicked grin. This time he had her!
"How many cartridges have you?" he asked.
She ran for her belt, and counted the cartridges.
"So. If you never miss, you'll get twenty-seven grouse. That would mean twenty-seven, meals. One meal a day, twenty-seven days. I'd still be on my back, our ammunition would be gone, and--"
"Don't!" she cried, in tears. "I wasn't thinking."
"Never mind!" he replied, almost gently. "But we'll deny ourselves the grouse."
"Yes, it's got to be the deer. I'll begin now."
"No, there's something else that must be done first."
"It will be easier--and perhaps even nicer--to move me than poor Trixy. See that big pine yonder--the one that stands out from the forest? Well, you and Tuesday must drag me there."
He explained his plan to her, and she set herself at once to executing it. And her spirits rose again; for she thought he had abandoned his desperate resolution. So, indeed, he had--for the moment. But he had deliberately beguiled her; their situation he knew to be quite unchanged in its inevitable termination, since a food supply would save them from starvation only to deliver them to the snow; and he must disarm her of suspicion in order to find a way to send her back on the trail. For he had reflected on the implication of tragic finality in the speech that had surprised and disturbed him; and he did not doubt that when the time should come, and she should find herself alone, her high resolve would prove to have been mere emotional exaggeration.
Mounted on Tuesday, Marion attacked the boughs of a small pine with the hatchet until she had severed three large branches, to which she tied Haig's rope, and hauled them back to the camp. Of these branches Haig contrived a crude drag, on which he crawled, and lay flat; the free end of the rope was hitched to the horn of Tuesday's saddle; and the journey was begun. Twice the saddle slipped, and progress was interrupted while Marion tightened the cinches. Once the drag itself came to pieces, and Haig was left sprawling on the ground. But eventually, with no more serious injury to Haig than a bruised elbow, not counting his torn clothing, they reached the goal.
There Marion made a wide bed against the exposed top roots of the tree, filling the spaces among the pine boughs with moss, and placing the two saddles at the head for pillows. Night had come before she had completed this labor, and gathered another supply of dead limbs and rotted logs, and cooked their meager supper. Then she wrapped Haig in his blankets, and rolled herself in her own, and lay down at his side. What with watching and replenishing the fire, and listening to night-cries heard or imagined, and waking from restless slumber chilled to the bone, she slept as little as on the preceding night, and was glad of the dawn, which came peacefully enough on the heels of a storm that raged on Thunder Mountain and sent a cold and beating rain upon the valley.