The night came, but the girl did not come.  Bates made a great torch of pine boughs and resin, and this he lit and hoisted on a pole fixed in the ground, so that if she was seeking to return to her home in the darkness she might be guided by it.  He hoped also that, by some chance, the surveying party might see it and know that it was a signal of distress; but he looked for their camp-fire on the opposite hills, and, not seeing it, felt only too sure that they had gone out of sight of his.  He fed and watched his torch all night.  Snow began to fall; as he looked up it seemed that the flame made a globe of light in the thick atmosphere, around which closed a low vault of visible darkness.  From out of this darkness the flakes were falling thickly.  When the day broke he was still alone.

CHAPTER VII.

When Saul and the oxen were once fairly started, they plodded on steadily.  The track lay some way from the river and above it, through the gap in the hills.  Little of the hills did Saul see for he was moving under trees all the way, and when, before noon, he descended into the plain on the other side, he was still for a short time under a canopy of interlacing boughs.  There was no road; the trees were notched to show the track.  In such forests there is little obstruction of brushwood, and over knoll and hollow, between the trunks, the oxen laboured on.  Saul sat on the front ledge of the cart to balance it the better.  The coffin, wedged in with the potash barrel, lay pretty still as long as they kept on the soft soil of the forest, but when, about one o’clock, the team emerged upon a corduroy road, made of logs lying side by side across the path, the jolting often jerked the barrel out of place, and then Saul would go to the back of the cart and jerk it and the coffin into position again.

The forest was behind them now.  This log road was constructed across a large tract which sometime since had been cleared by a forest fire, but was now covered again by thick brush standing eight or ten feet high.  One could see little on either side the road except the brown and grey twigs of the saplings that grew by the million, packed close together.  The way had been cut among them, yet they were forcing their sharp shoots up again between the seams of the corduroy, and where, here and there, a log had rotted they came up thickly.  The ground was low, and would have been wet about the bushes had it not been frozen.  Above, the sky was white.  Saul could see nothing but his straight road before and behind, the impenetrable thicket and the white sky.  It was a lonely thing thus to journey.