When it becomes clear that no help is coming to the stranded travelers stuck in the snow, the author uses pathos—a strong appeal to the reader's emotions—to suggest that no one is entirely good or bad. Characters who seem "bad" initially or who have done "bad" things can actually act lovingly and selflessly if given the chance.
Pathos occurs in two principal places: first, when the elderly Mother Shipton starves herself to death so that the "child" Piney may have her rations:
“I’m going,” she said, in a voice of querulous weakness, “but don’t say anything about it. Don’t waken the kids. Take the bundle from under my head and open it.” [...] It contained Mother Shipton’s rations for the last week, untouched. “Give ’em to the child,” she said, pointing to the sleeping Piney. “You’ve starved yourself,” said the gambler.
Mother Shipton, previously a cantankerous character given to cursing at Poker Flat, sacrifices herself so that the younger characters may have a chance at survival. The narrator invokes the reader’s pity with adjectives like “querulous,” making Mother Shipton seem elderly and pathetic in her “weakness." Paradoxically, this weakness makes her seem even braver to the reader, because of the moral strength it took to make her decision to sacrifice herself. By displaying that even characters who are exiled as “outcasts” may behave virtuously as members of a community, Harte builds upon the theme of morality versus immorality in the story.
A second instance of pathos occurs when Piney, the 15-year-old runaway bride, and the Duchess, a prostitute, resign themselves to their death and comfort each other:
Piney, accepting the position of the stronger, drew near and placed her arm around the Duchess’s waist. They kept this attitude for the rest of the day [...] Toward morning they found themselves unable to feed the fire, which gradually died away. As the embers slowly blackened, the Duchess crept closer to Piney, and broke the silence of many hours: “Piney, can you pray?” “No, dear,” said Piney, simply. [...]
Later, after the women have died,
when pitying fingers brushed the snow from their wan faces, you could scarcely have told from the equal peace that dwelt upon them, which was she that had sinned.
Both too weak even to “pray” by the end of the story, Piney and the Duchess display kindness and sisterhood to each other in the face of impossible circumstances. Locked “in each other's arms," they support and protect each other even in death, adding a sense of sweetness and wistfulness to the grim mood at the story's end. They look so innocent and loving when they are found by the search party from Poker Flat that it is impossible for those who find them to imagine that they had ever “sinned” at all, or to tell which one the "sinner" actually was. Their friendship, and their “equal peace” in death, supports Harte's argument that black-and-white rulings of morality do not account for the variability of human character.
