He lighted his pipe with a splinter of burning pine.  Then for the first time he saw the waste of scattered matches on the floor.  From them he looked to her in an amazement so sheer that it left him no word of expostulation.  The suspicion actually came to him that the girl was mad.  It was scarcely conceivable that a perfectly sane individual could do the things which she had done.

She saw him get up and begin gathering up all of the foodstuff.  He carried it to the back of the cave, where he passed out of her sight in the dark.  He was gone ten minutes and came back empty-handed.  He made the second trip, after which there was left on a shelf of rock only half a dozen matches and enough food for one scanty meal.  This Gloria ignored.

“Do you think,” she said contemptuously, “that what you have hidden back there I couldn’t find?”

“You could find it but you won’t,” he returned with quiet assurance that jerked the question from her: 

“Why?”

“Because,” he grunted contemptuously, “you are too much of a coward to go back there to look for it.”

And in her heart she knew that here was but the mere truth.  For, why was she not already in Gratton’s camp?  Her opportunity had come and gone—­because she had been afraid.

Chapter XXV

King awoke filled with resolve and definite purpose.  It was pitch dark, but he sensed the coming of wintry dawn.  He drew on his boots and went to look out.  It was still snowing, heavily, steadily, implacably.  He kicked the loose fluffy stuff underfoot.

“The biggest storm in twenty years,” he told himself.  “And if any one of us in these mountains come out of them alive he’ll have something to talk about.  It’s the real thing.”

He went grimly about his fire-making, fixed purpose crystallizing to the smallest detail.  Again he must seek immediately to locate his horse; one could eat horseflesh if driven to it.  He must try to get game of some sort.  And every lost hour meant lessened chances of his killing forest meat; deer and bear and the smaller folk, if they had been caught napping, would be scurrying out of the mountains long before now; soon the solitudes would be utterly barren and empty.  He went to Gloria’s bed.

“You’d better get up,” he said briefly.  “Time to start the day.  While we eat I want to talk with you.”

She awoke slowly, blinked at him, and only drew her blanket higher about her chin.

“I am tired,” she answered petulantly.  “Don’t you realize that a girl...”

“I realize,” he cut into her sleepy expostulation, “that you are weak and frightened and useless.  And that those are three of the many things you’ve got to get over the shortest way if you don’t want to die here.”

“I don’t know that I care to live,” she began, turning with her old instinct toward an attitude which before now had robbed him of his harshness.  But his plan was set in cold determination, and he cut her short again.