It tore in
frothing maelstroms through a thousand rocks, filling the night with a low
thunder. To John Aldous the sound of it might have been a thousand miles
away. He did not hear. His eye saw nothing in the blackness. For a few
moments the question he had asked himself obliterated everything. If they
found Joanne's husband alive at Tete Jaune--what then? He turned back,
retracing his steps over the trail, a feeling of resentment--of hatred for
the man he had never seen--slowly taking the place of the oppressive thing
that had turned his heart sick within him. Then, in a flash, came the
memory of Joanne's words--words in which, white-faced and trembling, she
had confessed that her anxiety was not that she would find him dead, but
that _she would find him alive_. A joyous thrill shot through him as he
remembered that. Whoever this man was, whatever he might have been to her
once, or was to her now, Joanne did not want to find him alive! He laughed
softly to himself as he quickened his pace. The tense grip of his fingers
loosened. The grim, almost ghastly part of it did not occur to him--the
fact that deep in his soul he was wishing a man dead and in his grave.
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