A shower of sparks arose and the strong smell of burning clothes, as
Sanderson, stunned and helpless, lay across the blazing fire-place.
For a moment, David thought to leave his vanquished foe to his own
fate, then he turned back. What was the use? It could not right the
wrong he had done to Anna. He bent over Sanderson, extinguished the
fire, pulled the unconscious man to the open door and left him.
It came to David like an inspiration that he had not thought of the
lake; the ice was thin on the southern shore below where the river
emptied. Suppose she had gone there; suppose in her utter desolation
she had gone there to end it all? Imagination, quickened by suspense
and suffering, ran to meet calamity; already he was there and saw the
bare trees, bearing their burden of snow, and the placid surface, half
frozen over, and on the southern shore, that faintly rippled under its
skimming of ice, something dark floating. He saw the floating black
hair, and the dead eyes, open, as if in accusation of the grim
injustice of it all.
He hurried through the drifted snow, as fast as his spent strength
would permit, stumbling once or twice over some obstruction, and
covered the weary distance to the lake.
About a hundred yards from the lake Dave saw something that made his
heart knock against his ribs and his breath come short, as if he had
been running. It was Anna's gray cloak. It lay spread out on the snow
as if it had been discarded hastily; there were footprints of a woman's
shoes near by; some of them leading toward the lake, others away from
it, as if she might have come and her courage failed her at the last
moment. The cape had not the faintest trace of snow on its upturned
surface. It must, therefore, have been discarded lately, after the
snowstorm had ceased this morning.
Dave continued his search in an agony of apprehension. The sun faintly
struggled with the mass of gray cloud, revealing a world of white. He
had wandered in the direction of a clump of cedars, and remembered
pointing the place out to her in the autumn as the scene of some boyish
adventure, which to commemorate he had cut his name on one of the
trees. Association, more than any hope of finding her, led him to the
cedars--and she was there. She had fallen, apparently, from cold and
exhaustion. He bent down close to the white, still face that gave no
sign of life. He called her name, he kissed her, but there was no
response--it was too late.