sky.
A long minute passed. He beat his hands together and tramped a small, impatient circle, waiting. At last the answer came, a tiny mushroom of sound muffled under the blanket of snow. It came from downstream, but there was no way of telling how far; distances and directions could not be trusted.
His back to the wind, Grant clawed his way along the creek bank, slipping, stumbling, but always inching his way forward, with the creek itself as his only guide. He fired another round and again he got an answer, this time closer and slightly to the right.
He began climbing the bank, grabbing at roots and brittle weeds, his eyes slitted, almost closed, as he peered into that blanket of snow. Another shot led him away from the creek, away from his only touch with reality and direction. But now he heard a voice calling weakly, “Over here! Over here!”
If his face had not been frozen, leatherlike and stiff, perhaps he would have smiled with grim humor. The irony here was almost too much to believe, and yet he was not surprised. It was almost as though he had expected Dagget to be here, almost as though he had known all along and was helpless to ignore the warning.
“Sam, is that you?” Dagget called hoarsely. “My horse fell on my leg. I can't move.”
It was then that Grant saw the shapeless form lying in the brush, plastered on the windward side with a crust of ice and snow. “It's not Sam,” he said, kneeling down beside the marshal.
Dagget turned his head and stared. His blue face expressionless, his eyelashes tipped with ice, his hair powdered with snow and sleet, he looked the picture of a winter storm.
“How bad are you hurt?” Grant said.
“My leg's broke, I think,” Dagget said matter-of-factly, gazing steadily at Grant's face.
“What happened to the others? I saw five men with you not long ago.”
The marshal snorted with profound disgust, but that was his only comment.
Grant moved his numb fingers up Dagget's right leg, feeling the hump of the break a few inches below the knee. Then for a few brief seconds he held Dagget's bleak gaze, doing nothing, saying nothing. It would be so easy to go on doing nothing. The posse members had deserted or were lost in the storm. It would be a simple thing to return to the dugout and stay there till the storm was over, then make a run for it while the Territory dug itself out.
Dagget would die in a matter of minutes—but this was a game of life and death, with no consolation for the loser. Dagget knew that the day he first pinned on a federal star-he must have known that sooner or later this would come.
But this line—the logical line—of thought offered little comfort to Grant. Whatever he was, he was no murderer. He shoved himself to his feet and thrashed blindly through the brush. He ran straight on into a slender cottonwood sapling, and he grasped it in both hands and broke it across his knee.
The marshal looked up in surprise as Grant came blundering back through the storm. “I thought you were gone.”
“You do too much thinking, Dagget. Maybe that's your trouble.”
The marshal threw back his head and his mouth flew open as Grant grasped his broken leg and pulled it straight, but no sound of pain escaped him. He watched bleakly as Grant broke the brittle young sapling again and made two splints to fit on either side of the break.
“What are you doing?” Dagget said, the words coming through clinched teeth.
“The leg has to be splinted or the broken bone will come through the skin. We've got a good piece to go, and it's apt to be a long while before you see a doctor.”
Dagget's mouth twisted into what might have passed as a grim smile. “You're wastin' your time. You wouldn't stand a chance of getting back to Sabo.”
“I'm holed up in an old Boomer dugout upstream. It's not exactly fancy but it's tight; we won't freeze.”
The marshal gritted his teeth and said nothing as Grant pulled his belt tight around the splinted leg, then he lay still for a moment, breathing hard. “You're aiming to take me back to your dugout,” he said flatly. “Is that it?”
“Unless you'd rather stay here.”
“Before you go too far, we'd better get something straight. I'll not be bought, not even with my own life. As long as I'm alive I'll be after you for robbing that Joplin bank.”
“I figured you would be,” Grant said harshly.
Numb and near blinded, their clothing crackling with ice, Grant dragged the marshal the length of Slush Creek until they stumbled over the cottonwood log crossed with brush. Both men paused, breathing hard, the marshal holding fast to Grant's left arm.
“We'll have to climb the bank here,” Grant said, almost yelling.
Dagget nodded, but at the first step his icy face went gray and Grant had to catch him in his arms. He stood for a moment, his mind as numb as his body. He surveyed the sheer creek bank as a mountaineer might gaze hopelessly up at Everest's highest peak. In Grant's mind Dagget had ceased to be a marshal, or even another man. It was almost as if this dead, bulky weight was part of himself, a useless appendage that must be dragged along wherever he went. Slowly he tuned his ears to the wind and to the noise of driving sleet as it ripped the bark from cottonwood and scrub oak. He saw himself, no longer standing, but sitting leisurely in the snow, waiting for the insidious cold to work its painless magic.
At last a slow, insignificant fear began to stir inside him, and he thought, “I'm freezing. This is the way it is when the temperature drops thirty degrees in as many minutes.”
Abruptly, in a kind of bleak panic, he shoved himself to his feet and attacked the icy creek bank, still dragging Dagget's bulky weight with one hand. He crashed through the tall weeds standing like giant upside-down icicles in front of the dugout, and shoved open the stockade door.
Only after several minutes of rubbing his hands before the fire did he realize that he had left Dagget in the open doorway. He pulled the marshal inside and blocked the opening again.
“Dagget!”
Water from the thawing snow rolled down the marshal's face like giant tears. At last Dagget opened his eyes and glanced coldly at Grant. “This is quite a place you've got here.”
“It'll have to do.” Quickly he examined the marshal's leg and saw that the splints had held. “I'll pull you over to the fire; it won't he long before you're thawed out.”
Dagget sighed, a strange, hard cast on his blunt features. “Just a minute; there's something I have to do first.” Propping himself up on one elbow, he reached into his wind-breaker and drew his revolver. “You're under arrest, Grant. Let me have your gun.”
Grant felt himself go rigid. “You don't waste any time, do you?”
Dagget's voice was bleak, without tone or timbre. “I warned you how it was going to be. I didn't ask you to save my life.”
Grant's voice was almost a snarl. “I should have left you out there to freeze!”
“Maybe... but you didn't. I'm still alive and I'm still a deputy U. S. marshal.” He motioned with the muzzle of his revolver. “You're under arrest and I want your gun.”
“And if I don't give it to you?”
“You will, because you know I mean business.”
The day was an endless, howling eternity. Grant kept just enough wood in the fireplace to drive back the icy chill and warned himself to stay awake and alert. Sooner or later Dagget would have to sleep; eventually he would have to give in to exhaustion and pain.
But the marshal showed no signs of giving in. Against the far wall in the dark shadows, his face expressionless, the color of yellow clay, he sat hour after hour, the revolver handy at his side. As the day dragged on, Grant became acutely aware of his own hunger, the growling and sour nervousness of his stomach.
“I brought no provisions here,” he said at last, watching Dagget's face. “We've got nothing to eat.”
The marshal shrugged faintly. “The storm won't last more than a day or so. Then somebody from Sabo or Kiefer will come looking for me.”
“We're snowed in. How are they going to find us?”
Dagget shook his head as if to say he'd worry about that when the time came.
Once more the dugout became heavy with silence. Snow from the outside had clogged the chimney opening
