For over an hour she had hobbled blindly. It was wholly by accident
that she had stumbled into the clearing. And the capture of Ruggam
had diminished in importance. Warm food, water that would not tear
her raw throat, a place to lie and recoup her strength after the
chilling winter night--these were the only things that counted now.
Though she knew it not, in her eyes burned the faint light of fever.
When a snag caught her snowshoe and tripped her, there was hysteria
in her cry of resentment.
As she moved across from the timber-line her hair was revealed
fallen down; she had lost a glove, and one hand and wrist were
cruelly red where she had plunged them several times into the snow
to save herself from falling upon her face. She made but a few yards
before the icy thong of her right snowshoe snapped. She did not
bother to repair it. Carrying it beneath her arm, she hobbled
brokenly toward the shelter of the buildings.
Her failure at the other cabins, the lack, thus far, of all signs of
the fugitive, the vastness of the hunting-ground magnified by the
loneliness of winter, had convinced her finally that her quest was
futile. It was all a venture of madness. The idea that a woman,
alone and single-handed, with no weapon but a revolver, could track
down and subdue a desperate murderer in winter mountains where
hardly a wild thing stirred, and make him return with her to the
certain penalty--this proved how much mental mischief had again been
caused by the lure of money.
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