Ordeal by Hunger by George R. Stewart

Author:George R. Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

CHAPTER XXII

The Children Walk

LATE that Monday morning they filed off through the pine-trees. Since no snow had fallen, they could follow the trail which the seven had made when coming in. This made trail-breaking easier. A man with snow-shoes went ahead, and the others followed, stepping in his tracks where the snow was pressed hard. Even so, it was killing work. The little fellows like Jimmy and Tommy Reed could not reach from one foot-print to the next, but had to rest a knee on the hill of snow between and scramble over each time. The line soon lengthened. The stronger ones like Billy Graves kept up with the leader; far behind lagged the weaker ones—the Reed children, Leanna Donner, and poor John Denton.

The men of the relief party encouraged the stragglers, but they soon saw that Tommy Reed simply could not make it. And there was no one to carry him. He struggled on for two miles, a truly heroic distance for a three-year-old, and then gave out. Patty, his sister of eight, was in little better condition. Glover had to break the news to Mrs. Reed that the two children must be taken back to the cabins. This was practically a death-sentence, but the safety of the whole party could not be jeopardized for the sake of two.

Mrs. Reed was faced with the most terrible of dilemmas. Should she struggle onwards to save herself for the sake of her husband and two children, or should she go back with the other two? Glover promised that once he had got the party safely through he would return to rescue Patty and Tommy; he pledged his honor. But a man’s honor seemed a small thing compared with sending her two children back among the crazed inmates of the cabins, and Mrs. Reed was almost too prostrated for a decision. Suddenly she grasped at a straw; her husband was a Mason; this man might be.

“Are you a Mason?” she asked.

As the luck fell, he was.

“Do you promise me,” she went on, “upon the word of a Mason, that when you arrive at Bear River valley, you will return and bring out my children, if we shall not, in the meantime, meet their father going for them?”

“I thus do promise.”

Then Mrs. Reed, Virginia, and Jimmy said their good-byes to Patty and Tommy. Little Tommy was too small to realize what was happening, but experience had already aged Patty far beyond her eight years, and her clear-eyed stoical acceptance of the situation was more moving than childish tears would have been.

“Well, mother,” she said, “if you never see me again, do the best you can.”

Even the hardy men of the rescue party were at the point of weeping when Glover and the indefatigable Moultry started back with the two children. On the way to the cabins Patty with her matter-of-fact, childish disillusion informed the two men that she was willing to go back and take care of her little brother but that she never expected to see her mother again.

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