in their narrow stalls, had
mingled with it, and added to its terrors.

But, when another wild, sunless day had come in, the drift-piled home
had ceased to shiver and creak or admit any sounds from without. Hour by
hour it had settled deeper and deeper into the snow that weighted its
roof and shuttered its windows, until, shrouded and almost effaced, it
lay, at last, secure from the tempest that swept over it and deaf to the
calls from the buried stables.

Down-stairs in the big, dim sitting-room, the neighbor woman was keeping
the lonely vigil of the stork. Early the previous day, before the storm
began, and when the plains still stretched away on all sides, a
foam-covered sea, the huge swells of which had been gripped and frozen
into quiet, the anxious husband had mounted and started westward across
the prairie. The horse had not carried him far, however, for the drifts
would not bear its weight; so, when the three big brothers, hearing his
halloo, had taken him a pair of rude skees made of barrel staves, he had
helped them free the floundering animal, and had then gone on afoot.

His destination was the army post at the reservation, and he had made
swift progress toward it. The ice-bound Vermilion did not check him, and
the sealed sloughs shortened his path. Onward he had sped, tirelessly.
In half an hour his scarlet nubia had blended into the black of his
fur-lined coat; in an hour he was only a speck, now in sight upon the
top of a swell, now lost in its trough. And then he had disappeared
altogether over the long, unbroken line of the horizon.

That day had passed, and the night; and, when a second day was half
gone, he had not yet returned. The farm-house, as hopeful as a sailor's
home, felt little worry, believing that he was too good a plainsman to
brave such a blizzard foolishly, and pictured him fretting his time away
at the post, or in some hospitable shanty nearer by.

But the neighbor woman was full of fear for his safety. And, as she
waited alone, she walked to and fro, watching first the canopied bed in
the corner, and then the shaking sash that, if Providence were merciful,
might at any moment frame an eager face. Every little while she paused
at the stove, where, the hay twists having long since given out, she fed
the fire from a heaping basket of yellow, husked corn.

The three big brothers were in the attic overhead, huddled close about
the warm stovepipe that came up through the floor, with the