discipline. He
would figure it all out and seek the best way through. Long, weary
miles of trackless forest stretched between him and safety. There was
no food in this cabin, no blankets; and the fire was out. His
Twenty-three Mile cabin was only slightly less distant than the one he
had left. And through those endless drifts and interminable forests the
blind, unaided, could not find their way.

He could conceive of no circumstances whereby Virginia and Harold would
come to look for him short of another day and night. They did not
expect him back until the end of the present day; they could not
possible start forth to seek him until another daylight. And this man
knew what the forest and the cold would do to him in twenty-four hours.
Already the cold was getting to him.

For all that he had no food, he knew that if he could keep warm he could
survive until help came. Yet men cannot fast in these winter woods as
they can in the South. The simple matter of inner fuel is a desperate
and an essential thing. But he had no blankets, and without a fire he
would die, speedily and surely. He didn't deceive himself on this
point. He knew the northern winter only too well. A few hours of
suffering, then a slow warmth that stole through the veins and was the
herald of departure. He had been warmed through in the cabin, but that
warmth would soon pass away. He wondered if he could rebuild the fire.

He was suddenly shaken with terror at the thought that already he did
not know in what direction the fire and the cabin lay. He had become
turned around when he strode out to light the match. Instantly he began
to search for the cabin door. He went down on his hands in the snow,
groping, then moved in a slow, careful circle. Just one little second's
bewilderment, one variation from the circle, and he might lose the cabin
altogether. That meant _death!_ It could mean no other thing.

But in a moment the smoke blew into his face, and he advanced into the
ashes. The next moment, by circling again, he found the cabin door. He
leaned against it, breathing hard.

"It won't do, Bill," he told himself. "Hold steady--for one minute
more."

A spruce log, the last segment of the tree he had cut, lay somewhere a
few feet from his door. But he remembered it had fallen into a thicket
of evergreen: could he find it now? The log would not burn until it was
cut up with his ax: the ax would be hard to find in the pressing