and
my legs tingle. Then the storm-devils howled in my eyes and the
ice-lashes snapped in my face. Then the wind went off on a rampage
again, and I couldn't see. I couldn't move forward. I couldn't even
breathe. Then I got frightened.

I leaned there against the wind calling for Dinky-Dunk and Olie,
whenever I could gasp breath enough to make a sound. But I might as well
have been a baby crying in mid-ocean to a Kensington Gardens nurse.

Then I knew I was lost. No one could ever hear me in that roar. And
there was nothing to be seen, just a driving, blinding, stinging gray
pall of flying fury that nettled the naked skin like electric-massage
and took the breath out of your buffeted body. There was no land-mark,
no glimpse of any building, nothing whatever to go by. And I felt so
helpless in the face of that wind! It seemed to take the power of
locomotion from my legs. I was not altogether amazed at the thought that
I might die there, within a hundred yards of my own home, so near those
narrow walls within which were warmth, and shelter, and quietness. I
imagined how they'd find my body, deep under the snow, some morning; how
Dinky-Dunk would search, perhaps for days. I felt so sorry for him I
decided not to give up, that I wouldn't be lost, that I wouldn't die
there like a fly on a sheet of tanglefoot!

I had fallen down on my knees, with my back to the wind, and already the
snow had drifted around me. I also found my eye-lashes frozen together,
and I lost several winkers in getting rid of those solidified tears. But
I got to my feet and battled on, calling when I could. I kept on, going
round and round in a circle, I suppose, as people always do when
they're lost in a storm. Then the wind grew worse again. I couldn't make
any headway against it. I had to give up. I simply _had_ to! I wasn't
afraid. I wasn't terrified at the thought of what was happening to me. I
was only sorry, with a misty sort of sorrow I can't explain. And I don't
remember that I felt particularly uncomfortable, except for the fact I
found it rather hard to breathe.

It was Olie who found me. He came staggering through the snow with extra
fuel for the bunk-house, and nearly walked over me. As we found out
afterward, I wasn't more than thirty steps away from that bunk-house
door. Olie pulled me up out of the snow the same as you'd pull a skein
of darning-silk out of a work-basket. He half carried me to the
bunk-house, got his bearings, and then