It must have been about the middle of the next forenoon--he had ceased to reckon time, and there were no more notches cut on the black wall of the cave--when Philip, sitting at Marion's side, observed a curious, restless movement of her head. She had lain all morning in a stupor, very still, with only an occasional murmur from her dry lips. But now, moving her head from side to side, she tried to lift it, as if to listen.
"What is it, Marion?" asked Haig, leaning close to her.
He obeyed her, or pretended to, and turned an ear toward the mouth of the cavern. The wind was up with its wailing and its snarls and shrieks. He heard it for a moment, then looked at her again.
"Listen!" she repeated, with a touching emphasis, almost childish, almost petulant.
"Can't you hear it?" she pleaded. "Listen!"
It was the delirium again; she was hearing things that were not, except in her disordered mind. Perhaps--he had read somewhere that the dying, those of them that are pure at heart, sometimes hear the calling of the--
"Somebody's--coming!" she cried in the thinnest, most childlike treble. Her face shone; she tried to sit up; she raised one hand feebly toward him.
"Please lie down, dear!" pleaded Haig, pressing her gently back.
She resisted him, smiling and frowning at the same time.
"Be--very--still. And--listen!" she persisted.
To please her, he sat erect, and listened. They were very still then, one of her hands between both of his. And the storm was raging. It was wilder, wilder. All the fury of Thunder Mountain seemed to be behind the wind that came shrieking and bellowing down the gulch.
The seconds passed, with dead silence in the cave, and that bedlam let loose outside.
Then suddenly Haig lifted his head. What was it? There seemed to have come--No, it was but a mocking voice of the hurricane, one of the myriad voices of that wintry inferno, mocking them with a half-human cry. He looked sadly down at Marion, and saw that wondrous smile again upon her emaciated face. Oh, but this was maddening! Yet because she wished it, he listened again. And then, out of that tumult--very faint and far--
He leaped to his feet. He forgot his crutches. He flung himself across the floor of the cave in three reckless bounds, flung himself on the barrier of logs and limbs, clawing it like a maniac, or a wild beast, tore his way through it, and stood in the snow on the platform, calling into the storm, shrieking, bellowing, out-shrieking and out-bellowing the storm, swaying dizzily in the wind, and clutching at the air before him in a frenzy.