ally noticed that he floundered rather wildly. In another
moment or two, however, he vanished into the gloom among the trees, and
she sat listening to the uneven crunch of his footsteps in the snow,
until there was a sudden crash of broken branches, and a sound as of
something falling heavily down a declivity. Then there was another
crash, and stillness again.

Sally gasped, and clenched her mittened hands hard upon the reins as she
remembered that Lorton's by-trail skirted the edge of a very steep bank,
but she lost neither her collectedness nor her nerve. Presence of mind
in the face of an emergency is probably as much a question of experience
as of temperament, and, like other women in that country, she had seen
men struck down by half-trained horses, crushed by collapsing
strawpiles, and once or twice gashed by mower blades. This was no doubt
why she remembered that the impatient team would probably move on if she
left the sleigh, and therefore drove the horses to the first of the
birches before she got down. Then she knotted the reins about a branch,
and called out sharply.

No answer came out of the shadows, and her heart beat unpleasantly fast
as she plunged in among the trees, keeping below the narrow trail that
went slanting up the side of the declivity, until she stopped, with
another gasp, when she reached a spot where a ray of moonlight filtered
down. A limp figure in an old skin coat lay almost at her feet, and she
dropped on her knees beside it in the snow. Hawtrey's face showed an
unpleasant grayish-white in the faint silvery light.

"Gregory," she cried hoarsely.

The man opened his eyes, and blinked at her in a half-dazed manner.
"Fell down," he said. "Think I felt my leg go--and my side's stabbing
me. Go for somebody."

Sally glanced round, and noticed that the grain bag lay burst open not
far away. She fancied that he had clung to it after he lost his footing,
which explained why he had fallen so heavily, but that was not a point
of any consequence now. There was nobody who could help her within two
leagues of the spot, and it was evident that she could not leave him
there to freeze. Then she noticed that the trees grew rather farther
apart just there, and rising swiftly she ran back to bring the team. The
ascent was steep, and she had to urge the horses, with sharp cries and
blows from her mittened hand, among shadowy tree trunks and through
snapping undergrowth before she reached the spot where