His deep breath of exhaustion was a groan as he floundered back and shook the inert figure with all his might.
"Git up!" he shouted. "You must keep movin'! Do you want to lay right down and die?"
"Lemme be!" The words came thickly, and Sprudell did not lift his eyes.
"He's goin' to freeze on me sure!" Uncle Bill tried to lift him, to carry him, to drag him somehow--a dead weight--farther down the cañon.
It was hopeless. He let him fall and yelled. Again and again he yelled into the empty world about him. Not so much that he expected an answer as to give vent to his despair. There was not a chance in a million that the miner in the cabin would hear him, even if he were there. But he kept on yelling, whooping, yodling with all his might.
His heart leaped, and he stopped in the midst of a breath. He listened, with his mouth wide open. Surely he heard an answering cry! Faint it was--far off--as though it came through thicknesses of blankets--but it was a cry! A human voice!
"Hello! Hello!"
He was not mistaken. From somewhere in the white world of desolation, the answer came again: "Hello! Hello!"
Uncle Bill was not much given to religious allusions except as a matter of emphasis, but he told himself that that far-off cry of reassurance sounded like the voice of God.
"Help!" he called desperately, sunk to his armpits in the snow. "Help! Come quick!"
Night was so near that it had just about closed down when Bruce came fighting his way up the cañon through the drifts to Griswold's side. They wasted no time in words, but between them dragged and carried the unresisting sportsman to the cabin.
The lethargy which had been so nearly fatal was without sensation, but after an hour or so of work his saviors had the satisfaction of hearing him begin to groan with the pain of returning circulation.
"Git up and stomp around!" Uncle Bill advised, when Sprudell could stand. "But," sharply, as he stumbled, "look where you're goin'--that's a corp' over there."
The admonition revived Sprudell as applications of snow and ice water had not done. He looked in wide-mouthed inquiry at Bruce.
Bruce's somber eyes darkened as he explained briefly: "We had a fuss, and he went crazy. He tried to get me with the ax."
There was no need to warn Sprudell again to "look where he was goin'," as he existed from that moment with his gaze alternating between the gruesome bundle and the gloomy face of his black-browed host. Incredulity and suspicion shone plainly in his eyes. Sprudell's imagination was a winged thing, and now it spread its startled pinions. Penned up with a murderer--what a tale to tell in Bartlesville, if by chance he returned alive! The fellow had him at his mercy, and what, after all, did he know of Uncle Bill? Even fairly honest men sometimes took desperate chances for so fat a purse as his.