Judith’s tracks continued abruptly down the slope.  Douglas followed for a few feet, then stopped.  A horse had fallen here and rolled down the steep left wall.  He dropped to his knees and followed the wide, snow-packed trail.  He had not far to go.  From the snow drifted over a rock protruded a horse’s hoof.  Doug swept the body free of snow.  It was old Buster, with his right fore leg broken and a bullet wound in his head.  Hot tears scalded Doug’s wind-tortured eyes.  After a moment of search for further details of the catastrophe, he crawled up the wall again and, after a frantic hunt, found a blurred single horse trail leading on from the spot whence Buster had slipped.  He went back for his own horses, mounted Tom and pushed on downward.

But he could not continue long.  It was soon dusk and he dared not risk losing Judith’s tracks.  When he came upon the next cedar clump, clinging precariously to the mountainside, he dismounted.  Under the shelter of the trees, he fastened the horses.  He trampled the snow for his fire-place and chopped a night’s supply of wood.  After he had eaten a hot supper, he wrapped himself in his blankets and huddled over the fire, consumed by anxiety.

The wind rushed by the cedars without pause.  The hard, dry pellets of snow rattled on the trees.  The horses, their chins hung with icicles, stood with bowed heads, motionless.

All of Doug’s life passed in review before his sleepless eyes.  He could not recall when he had not been shaping his days around Judith.  Even when as children they had lived the snarling life of young pups, she had been the center of his universe.  He wondered if love came to many men as it had come to him.  He had not observed it in any other man in Lost Chief.  Perhaps Peter had cared so.  Perhaps in the outside world it was not infrequent.  But whether it was a common sort of love or not, he could not picture himself without Judith in his life.  If he should find her dead, farther down on this ghastly mountainside, he knew that the light and warmth within him would go out and that he never would finish the journey.

One by one he went over the steps of the past year that had culminated in this trip over Black Devil Pass.  He realized that every step had been the result of his own years of mental conflict.  Yet he could not see how he could have failed to take each step as he had taken it.  His mind mysteriously refused to present an alternative.  And, thinking thus, he was conscious of a sense of spiritual helplessness as if he were being borne on and on by forces quite beyond his control.  And there came to him a sudden and shattering conviction that this terrible night of loneliness had been inevitable since the day of his birth.  Call it Fate, he told himself, call it Destiny, call it what we might, something stronger than his own will had shaped his days toward this awful expedition.  Awful, he thought, not from the physical aspect—­he had endured as much in other