Hawtrey lay. He
looked up at her when at last the horses stood close beside him.

"You can't turn them here," he told her faintly.

Sally was never sure how she managed it, for the sleigh drove against
the slender trunks, and the fiery beasts, terrified by the snapping of
the undergrowth, were almost unmanageable; but at last they were facing
the descent again, and she stooped and twined her arms about the
shoulders of Hawtrey, who now lay almost against the sleigh.

"It's going to hurt, Gregory, but I have got to get you in," she warned
him.

Then she gasped, for Hawtrey was a man of full stature, and it was a
heavy lift. She could not raise him wholly, and he cried out once when
his injured leg trailed in the snow. Still, with the most strenuous
effort she had ever made she moved him a yard or so, and then staggering
fell with her side against the sleigh. She felt faint with the pain of
it, but with another desperate lift she drew him into the sleigh, and
let him sink down gently upon the bag that still lay there. His eyes had
shut again, and he said nothing now.

It required only another moment or two to wrap the thick driving-robe
about him, and after that, with one hand still beneath his neck, she
glanced down. It was clear that he was quite unconscious of her
presence, and stooping swiftly she kissed his gray face. She settled
herself in the driving-seat with only a blanket coat to shelter her from
the cold, and the horses went cautiously down the slope. She did not
urge them until they reached the level, for the trail that wound up out
of the ravine was difficult, but when the wide white expanse once more
stretched away before them she laid the biting whip across their backs.

That was quite sufficient. They were fiery animals, and when they broke
into a furious gallop the rush of night wind struck her tingling cheeks
like a lash of wires. All power of feeling went out of her hands, her
arms grew stiff and heavy, and she was glad that the trail led smooth
and straight to the horizon. Hawtrey, who had moved a little, lay
helpless across her feet. He did not answer when she spoke to him.

The team went far at the gallop. A fine mist of snow beat against the
sleigh, but the girl leaning forward, a tense figure, with nerveless
hands clenched upon the reins, saw nothing but the blue-gray riband of
trail that steadily unrolled itself before her. At length a blurred
mass, which she knew to be a birch bluff, grew