plea
now would be cheap and tawdry; they were in a world where there were
bigger things than human aims and human frailties. Besides, he had
locked his lips at the command of a grief-ridden woman. To open them
in self-extenuation would mean that she must be brought into it; for
she had been the one who had clinched the points of suspicion in the
mind of Medaine Robinette. Were he now to speak of proof that she had
lied--

It was impossible. The wind-swept night became wind-swept dawn, to
find him still huddled there, still thinking, still grim and drawn and
haggard with sleeplessness and fatigue. Then he rose at a call from
without:

"Are you ready?"

He affixed the pack. Together they went on again, graceless figures in
frozen clothing, she pointing the way, he aiding her with his strength,
in the final battle toward the summit of the range,--and Crestline.

Hours they plodded and climbed, climbed and plodded, the blood again
dripping from his lips, her features again shielded by the heavy folds
of the bandanna; the moisture of their breath at times swirling about
them like angry steam, at others invisible in the areas of sudden
dryness, where the atmosphere lapped up even the vapors of laboring
lungs before it could visualize. Snow and cloud and rising walls of
granite: this was their world, and they crawling pigmies within it.
Once she brushed against the pack on his back and drew away with a
sudden recoil. Houston dully realized the reason. The selfish,
gripping hands of Winter, holding nothing sacred, had invaded even
there.

Noon. And a half-cry from both of them, a burst of energy which soon
faded. For above was Crestline--even as the little Croatian settlement
had been--smokeless, lifeless. They had gone from here also, hurrying
humans fleeing with the last snowplow before the tempest, beings afraid
to remain, once the lines of communication were broken. But there was
nothing to do but go on.

Roofless houses met them, stacks of crumpled snow, where the beams had
cracked beneath the weight of high piled drifts; staring, glassless
windows and rooms filled with white; stoves that no longer fought the
clasp of winter but huddled instead amid piles of snow; that was all.
Crestline had fled; there was no life, no sound, only the angry,
wailing cry of the wind through half-frozen roof spouts, the slap of
clattering boards, loosened by the storm. Gloomily Houston surveyed
the desolate picture, a