THE CUP OF TREMBLING (continued 2)
Reading edition
"I'm goin' to stop right here till Jack Waring gets back."
"Oh, no, you're not. You are going this instant." She rose, and held out her hand. She had that power over him that one so much in earnest as she will always have over one who is amazed and in doubt.
"Won't you shake hands with me?" Her thrilling voice made a sort of music of the common words.
He took her hand, and wagged it clumsily in a dazed way, and she almost pushed him out of the house.
"Well, I'll be hanged if that ain't the meanest trick since I was born—to leave a little lone woman watchin' with a dead man in a cabin, with snow-slides startin' all over the mountains! What's the matter with me, anyhow? Seem to be knocked silly with her blamed queer talk. Heap of sense in it, too. Wouldn't think one of her kind would see it that way, though. Durned if I know which kind she is. B'lieve I'll go back now. Why, Lord! I must go back! What'll I say to Jim?"
David Bruce had gained the top of the road leading away from the mine before he came to himself in a burst of unconscious profanity. He could hear the howling of the wind around the horn of the peak. He looked up and down, and considered a second.
In another second it was too late—too late to add his life to hers, that instant buried beneath the avalanche.
A stroke out of a clear sky; a roar that filled the air; a burst of light snow mounting over the tree-tops like steam condensed above a rushing train; a concussion of wind that felled trees in the valley a hundred yards from the spot where the plunging mass shot down—then the chinook eddied back, across the track of the snow-slide, and went storming up the peak.