Presently he was trudging alone along the icy path. The flare of the red fire grew dim behind him; the last flicker faded. The woods were all unillumined, ghastly white, with a hovering gray shadow. The song of the bivouac fainted in the distance and failed; the echo grew doubtful and dull; and now in absolute silence that somehow set his nerves aquiver he was coming in with the dreary dusk and the driving snow to the old "waste town," Nilaque Great.
More silent even than the wilderness it seemed with the muffling drifts heavy on the roofs, blocking the dark open doors of the tenantless dwellings, lying in fluffy masses on the boughs of the trees that had once made the desert spaces so pleasantly umbrageous in those sweet summers so long ago. The great circular council-house, shaped like a dome, was whitely aglimmer against the gray twilight and the wintry background of the woods and mountains,--only the vaguest suggestions of heights seen through the ceaseless whirl of the crystalline flakes. No wolf now, although remembering the casual glimpse he had had he was prepared with rifle and pistol, and held his knife in his hand; no bear; no sign of living creature until, as he skirted the jagged bluff of the river where he fancied the horse might have lost his footing, he heard a sudden whinny of welcome, the sound keen and eerie and intrusive in the strange breathless solemnity of the silent place.
Gazing cautiously over the verge of the precipice, he saw the animal despite the gathering shadows. The horse was quite safe, having doubtless slipped down in the soft densities of a great drift dislodged from the crevice by his own weight. His pack was still on his back, now piled twice as high with snow. He lifted his arched neck as he sprang about with undiminished activity, vainly seeking to ascend the almost sheer precipice.
Daylight, however, was essential for his rescue. The effort now on these icy steeps might cost either man or beast a broken limb, if no more. With an instinct of self-protection the animal had chosen the lee of a great buttress of the cliff, and could stand there safely all night though the temperature should fall still lower. The young pack-man called out a word or two of encouragement, listening fearfully as the sound struck back in the silence from the icy bank of the river, the craggy hillsides, and the resonant walls of the deserted houses in the old "waste town." Himself suddenly stricken to silence, he realized as he turned that the night had at last closed in. It lay dark and desolate in the limitless woods, where a vague sense of motion gave token that the snow was still viewlessly falling in the dense obscurities.