He heard again the low cry that came from her lips then. In an instant
she had snatched the tiny, limp thing from between the cat's paws, and
had faced him. He was laughing at her, but the glow in her blue eyes
sobered him. "I didn't think you--would take pleasure in that, Jim," she
said. "It's only a mouse, but it's alive, and I can feel its poor little
heart beating!"
They had saved it, and he, a little ashamed at the smallness of the act,
had gone with Hester to the barn and made a nest for it in the hay. But
the wonderful words that he remembered were these: "Perhaps some day a
little mouse will help you, Jim!" Hester had spoken laughingly. And her
words had come true!
All the time that Falkner was preparing and eating his breakfast he
watched for the mouse, but it did not appear. Then he went to the door.
It swung outward, and it took all his weight to force it open. On one
side of the cabin the snow was drifted almost to the roof. Ahead of him
he could barely make out the dark shadow of the scrub spruce forest
beyond the little clearing he had made. He could hear the spruce-tops
wailing and twisting in the storm, and the snow and wind stung his face,
and half blinded him.
It was dark--dark with that gray and maddening gloom that yesterday would
have driven him still nearer to the merge of madness. But this morning he
laughed as he listened to the wailings in the air and stared out into the
ghostly chaos.
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