moment more, and
he faced Medaine Robinette.

"Just wanted to see if you're all right," came almost curtly.

"Yes--thank you."

"Need any food?"

"I have plenty."

"Anybody sick?"

"No. Lost Wing has found wood. We're keeping warm. Tell me--" and
there was the politeness of emergency in her tones--"is there any need
for women in Tabernacle? I am willing to go if--"

"Not yet. Besides, a woman couldn't get in there alone."

"I could. I'm strong enough. Besides, I've been out--I went to the
Hurd Ranch yesterday. Mrs. Hurd's sick--Lost Wing brought me the word."

"Then keep on with that. There's nothing in Tabernacle--and no place
for any one who isn't destitute. Stay here. Have you food enough for
Hurd's?"

"Yes. That is--"

"I'll leave my pack. Take that over as you need it. There's enough
for a week there. If things don't let up by that time, I'll be by
again."

"Thank you."

Then the door was closed, and Houston went his way again, back to
Tabernacle and a fresh supply for his pack--hardly realizing the fact
that he had talked to the woman he could not help wishing for--the
woman he would have liked to have loved. The world was almost too
gray, too grim, too horrible for Houston even to remember that there
was an estrangement between them. Dully, his intellect numbed as his
body was numbed, he went back to his tasks,--tasks that were seemingly
endless.

Day after day, the struggle remained the same, the wind, the snow, the
drifts, the white fleece flying on the breast of the gale even when
there were no storm clouds above, blotting out the light of the sun and
causing the great ball to be only a red, ugly, menacing thing in a
field of dismal gray. Night after night the drifts swept, changing,
deepening in spots where the ground had been clear before, smoothing
over the hummocks, weaving across the country like the vagaries of
shifting sands before they finally packed into hard, compressed mounds,
to form bulwarks for newer drifts when the next storm came. Day after
day,--and then quiet, for forty-eight hours.

It caused men to shout,--men who had cursed the sun in the blazing
noonday hours of summer, but men who now extended their arms to it, who
slapped one another on the back, who watched the snow with blood-red
eyes for the first sign of a melting particle, and who became
hysterically jubilant when they saw it. Forty-eight hours! Deeper and
deeper went the imprints of mild