'You're hurt, that's cause enough. Maybe when you get well I'll have cause to shoot you, but right now I wouldn't leave no man in your kind of trouble.'
I said to Ange, 'You stay in the opening and keep a lookout. We may have to shoot our way out of here yet.'
Taking the pistol from his hand, I pulled back the blanket. He had made a try at splinting his leg, but the splints had come loose. The leg was swollen and looked a fright.
I cut a split in his pants leg, and cut his boot to get it off. No cowhand likes to have a good pair of boots ruined, but there was no other way about it. Looked like a clean break a few inches below the knee, but those splints had been a lousy job. I cut some fresh ones, then I made a try at doing something to ease him.
I heated some water, and put hot cloths on that leg. To tell the truth, I wasn't sure how much good they'd do, but they would make him think he was being helped, a comfort to a man that's been lying alone, half-froze to death in a lonely cave.
'You drag yourself here?'
'They left me.'
'That's a rawhide outfit, Kid. They aren't worth shootin'. You ought to cut loose from them and line up with a real bunch.'
Breaking some sticks, I built up the fire, and all the time I was thinking what a pickle we were in. We had it bad enough, Ange and me, trying to take out over that ridge. And as if we weren't in trouble enough, we were now saddled with a man with a broke ... broken leg.
Folks might say it was none of my business, that my first duty was to get Ange out of here, and myself. It was nip and tuck whether we would make it or not--I'd say we were on the short end of the odds. The Kid had come with men who intended to rob me, probably murder me. And before that he had tried to pick a fight with me. Someday, somebody was going to have to shoot him, more than likely.
But left here, he would freeze to death before he could starve. There was no two ways about that. And none of that gold-hungry crowd would lift a hand to help.
Taking the axe, I walked down to the trees. The moon was gone now, but day was not too far off. Searching through a bunch of second-growth timber, stuff that had grown up after a slide had ripped it down, I found in a thick cluster of aspen just what I wanted, and cut two slim poles about eight feet long.
I carried them back to the cave, after trimming the branches off, and then took the axe and smoothed off one side. My axe was sharp and I'd split enough rails for fences back in Tennessee to know how to trim up a young tree. On the bottom end I made a bevel, curving the end upward a mite.
Going to the woodpile, I cut some crosspieces, notched the poles to take four of them, and then fitted them into the notches.
'What you fixin'?'
'You set quiet. Can't pack you out of here on my back, so I'm fixing a toboggan . . . such as it is.'
'You'd take me out of here?' The Kid was not expecting any favors, seemed like.
'Can't let you lie here and freeze,' I told him irritably. 'Best thing you can do is stay quiet. If we get out at all, you'll be with us, but don't get your hopes up. Our chances are mighty poor.'
For several minutes, while I wove some rawhide around the crosspieces, Kid Newton had nothing to say. Finally, he eased his leg a mite. 'Sackett, you and that girl better take out. I mean, I'm no account. Why, I was fixin' to kill you back along the trail.'
'Kid, you'd never have cleared leather. I wasn't hunting trouble, but I cut my teeth on a six-shooter.'
'You can make it, you two. You're never going to get me over any trail on that sled.'
'We aren't going by trail.' I sat back on my heels. 'Kid, if you get out of this alive you can sure tell folks you've been up the creek and over the mountain, because that's where we're going.'
He didn't get it. And reason enough he couldn't. No man in his right mind would try what I figured to do.
Some of the trails by which we had come into the mountains would by now be a dozen feet under the snow. What I figured to do was go over the ridge ... to go right down the steep side of the mountain into camp.
Crazy? Sure . . . but the chute was choked with snow and ice, the upper valley was full by now, and the other trails, the one by which Ange came in ... the passes would be choked with snow there.
We had all come in on horseback, but no horse could get out. In places the snow might carry the weight of a man alone, but never the weight of men and horses. We might make it out, but it was a risk scarcely worth thinking about.
It is one thing to ride a horse through unknown country; it is another to go back afoot. It would take twice, maybe three times as long. The gang up there had figured to come in and go right out...
'What do you mean?' The Kid was looking at me now like he was afraid he did know.
Pausing in my work, I gestured at the mountain opposite, 'The one above us is higher, and we're going over it.'
He knew I was crazy now. One lone man taking a girl and a wounded man over that mountain!
The sky was gray overhead when we started out of there, me towing that crude toboggan behind me. The slope of talus was steep, but easier going with the snow on it, for the rock did not slide under me. Still, it was a struggle to get up to the foot of that chimney.
Ange looked up at it, and her eyes were mighty big when she turned back to me. 'Tell,' she whispered, 'you can't do it. It's impossible.'
To tell the truth, I didn't feel very good about it myself. That was a high mountain, and that climb was going to be something. Slinging my rifle around my shoulders and hanging a coil of rope to my belt, I told Ange to come
