His fellows had drawn closer so that they stood in a ring about the body.  One man alone held apart.  Gratton’s eyes were wild, void of purpose; the dead, chalky-white of his face turned a sickly greenish tinge.  After a little, while no one paid any attention to him, he began a slow withdrawal, moving jerkily step by step, his dragging heels making long furrows in the snow.  Then King, too, began to draw back, slipping quietly and swiftly through the screen of tree and bush, stepping in the tracks he had made coming hither, praying suddenly for further fast-falling snow to hide or obliterate the trail he had made.  And for the moment he was not thinking of the gold which they, too, sought, and which he had meant to snatch away from under their noses.  He thought only of Gloria.  If that crowd, in its present temper, found the way to his camp—­if, in one way or another, Gloria fell into their hands—­then could she thank God for a clean bullet and a swift end of things.

Chapter XXIV

The mere fact of being absolutely alone from midday to dark would have been for Gloria an experience at any time and in any environment.  Of her friends in the city there were many who had never in a lifetime known what it was to spend half a dozen consecutive daytime, waking hours in perfect solitude, catching not so much as a fleeting glimpse of a servant, a policeman, a nurse, or a street-car conductor in the echoing street.  Solitude rendered rippleless by an absence of any familiar sound; neither the whisk of a maid’s broom, the clang of a telephone bell, the buzz of motors, or the slamming of doors.  At those intervals when King thought of her, it was to realize that she might quite naturally find discomfort in her bleak surroundings, being denied coal-grate and upholstered chair; it did not suggest itself to him that the chief discomfort would be a spirit-crushing, terrifying loneliness.

She told herself, when he had gone, that she was glad to be alone.  Five minutes later she began to stir restlessly; another five minutes and already she was listening for his return.  Never once during the day was there a sudden or unexpected sound, whether the snapping of a burning faggot or the scratching against the rock of a log rolling apart, or the flap of her canvas, that she did not look expectantly toward the rude door through which she thought to see him returning.

Once that her restlessness came upon her she could not remain quiet.  She drew on her boots and walked up and down, casting fearsome glances toward the darkest portion of the cavern, shunning it, keeping the fire between it and herself.  When she peered out across the desolate world she drew back from its bleak menace, shuddering, returning to crouch miserably by her fire, shut in between two frightful things, the black unknown of the bowels of the cave, the white horror of the brutal, insensate wilderness.  And, in her almost hysterical emotional frenzy she saw back of each of them the man, Mark King, as though they were but the expressions of his own brutality.