Mike aimed carefully, for he was shaking with terror and the cold of those heights.  The sharp pow-w of his rifle crashed through the whispery roar of the pines, and the hills flung back muffled echoes.  Marion screamed, saw Jack sag down beside the spruce, clutched at him wildly, hampered by her muff.  Saw him go sliding down over the bank, into the gulch, screamed again and went sliding after him.

Afterwards she remembered a vague impression she had had, of hearing some one go crashing away down the gully, breaking the bushes that impeded his flight.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THE MISERERE OF MOTHERHOOD

The up-train came shrieking out of the last tunnel in Feather River Canyon, churned around a curve, struck a hollow roar from the trestle that bridges the mouth of Toll-Gate creek, shrieked again when it saw, down the white trail of its headlight, the whirling snow that swept down the canyon, and churned up the stiff grade that would carry it around through the Pocket at the head of the canyon and to the little yellow station just beyond.  A fight it would have to top the summit of the Sierras and slip down into the desert beyond, but it climbed the grade with a vicious kind of energy, twisted around the point of the hill where the Crystal Lake trail crossed and climbed higher, and with a last scream at the station lights it slewed past the curve, clicked over a switch or two and stood panting there in the storm, waiting to see whether it might go on and get the ordeal over with at once, or whether it must wait until the down train passed.

A thin, yellow slip ordered it to wait, since it was ten minutes behind time.  The down train was just then screaming into Spring Garden and would come straight on.  So the up train stood there puffing like the giant thing it was, while the funny little train from Quincy fussed back upon a different siding and tried its best to puff as loud as its big, important neighbor while it waited, too, for the down train.

Two men and a woman plowed through the wind and the snow and mounted wearily the steps of the little coach which comprised the branch line’s passenger service.  The two men took it all as a matter of course—­the bare little coach with plush seats and an air of transient discomfort.  They were used to it, and they did not mind.

The woman, however, halted inside the door and glanced around her with incredulous disdain.  She seemed upon the point of refusing to ride in so crude a conveyance; seemed about to complain to the conductor and to demand something better.  She went forward under protest and drew her gloved fingers across the plush back of a seat, looked at her fingers and said, “Hmh!” as though her worst fears were confirmed.  She looked at one of the men and spoke as she would speak to a servant.

“Is there no other coach on this train?”

“No, ma’am!” the man said, accenting the first word as though he wished to prevent argument.  “It’s this or walk.”