Seaforth had commenced to realize, still with a curious absence of concern which was possibly the result of cold and fatigue, that as the pony could not help him it might be too late very soon unless he made a vigorous effort to help himself, when he heard a shout, and something came slowly through the sliding whiteness in his direction.  Then there was another shout, and when somebody dragged the pony clear of the boulder he held on by the bridle and went floundering waist-deep up stream.  The water, however, now sank rapidly, and soon he was clear of it to the knee.  Then there was a clatter of hoofs on slippery rock, and he lurched dripping and gasping into the partial shelter of the pines.  Somebody smote him on the shoulder, and he heard Alton’s voice, “Get hold and hustle.  We’ll fetch Townshead’s in an hour or so.”

CHAPTER II

AT TOWNSHEAD’S RANCH

It was chilly and damp in the log-walled living-room of the Townshead homestead, which stood far up in a lonely valley amidst the scattered pines.  The room was also bare and somewhat comfortless, for the land was too poor to furnish its possessor with more than necessities, and Townshead not the man to improve it much.  He lay in an old leather chair beside the stove, a slender, grey-haired man with the worn look of one whose burden had been too heavy for him.  His face was thin and somewhat haggard, his long, slender hand rather that of an artist than a bush rancher, and his threadbare attire was curiously neat.  He wore among other somewhat unusual things an old red velvet jacket, and there was a little cup of black coffee and a single cigar of exceptional quality on the table beside him.

Townshead was, in fact, somewhat of an anachronism in a country whose inhabitants exhibit at least a trace of primitive and wholesome barbarity.  One could have fancied him at home among men of leisure and cultivated tastes, but he seemed out of place in a log-built ranch in the snow-wrapped wilderness swept by the bitter wind.  Perhaps he realized it, for his voice was querulous as he said, “I wonder if you have forgotten, Nellie, that we were sitting warm and safe in England five years ago tonight.”

Nellie Townshead looked up quickly over her sewing from the other side of the stove, and for a moment there was something akin to pain in her eyes.  They were clear brown eyes, and it was characteristic that they almost immediately brightened into a smile, for while the girl’s face resembled her father’s in its refinement, there was courage in it in place of weariness.

“I am afraid I do, though I try not to, and am generally able,” she said.

Townshead sighed.  “The young are fortunate, for they can forget,” he said.  “Even that small compensation is, however, denied to me, while the man I called my friend is living in luxury on what was yours and mine.  Had it been any one but Charters I might have borne it better, but it was the one man I had faith in who sent us out here to penury.”