During the night and now, during this inventory, he had been granted both ample time and cause for his decision. He addressed her with prompt frankness.
"Inside fifteen minutes we've got to be on our way out. As we go we'll look for the horse. But, find it or not, we're going."
She lay looking up at him thoughtfully. She had rested; she resented his coolly assumed mastery; she had not forgotten that there were other men near by. But she merely said, by way of beginning: "The storm is over, then?"
"No. But we are not going to wait. We have food for only six or seven days, at the most."
She let her eyes droop to the fire so that the lids hid them from him. It was not yet full day; it was still snowing. Gratton and the men with him would, of course, have ample supplies. She yearned feverishly to be rid of King and his intolerable domineering. She estimated swiftly that, paradoxically, her only power over him was that of powerlessness; while she lay here hers was, in a way, the advantage. On her feet, following him, he would be again to her the brute he had been coming in.
"I am tired out," she said faintly, still not looking up. "I am sick. I have a pain here." She moved her hand to her side where, in reality, she was conscious of a troublesome soreness. "I can't go on."
He stared at her. She was pale. Now that she lifted her eyes for a brief reading of his look, he remarked that they appeared unusually large and luminous. There was a flush on her cheeks. His old fear surged back on him: Gloria was going to die! So he did what Gloria had counted on having him do: put milk and sugar in her coffee and brought the cup to her; he hastened to serve her a piping-hot breakfast of crisp bacon, hot cakes and jam. He urged her to eat, and made his own meal of unsweetened black coffee and cakes without jam. Triumphantly and covertly Gloria observed all of this. Hers was the victory. Mark King was again waiting on her, hand and foot, sacrificing for her.
He allowed himself half a pipe of tobacco--tobacco, like food, was going to run out soon--and smoked sombrely. Here already was the thing to be dreaded more than aught else: Gloria threatened with illness. As Ben Gaynor's daughter, never as his own beloved wife, she had become his responsibility. She was a parcel marked "Fragile--Handle with Care," which he had undertaken to deliver safely to a friend.