" John. He was returning to
the ballroom.

"We were just coming to look for you, uncle," exclaimed Jacky. "They
tell us it is blowing outside."

"Just what I was coming to tell you, my dear. We must be going. Where
are the doctor and Aunt Margaret?"

"Getting ready," said Bill, quietly. "Have a good game?"

The old man smiled. His bronzed face indicated extreme satisfaction.

"Not half bad, boy--not half bad. Relieved Lablache of five hundred
dollars in the last jackpot. Held four deuces. He opened with full on
aces."

"Poker" John seemed to have forgotten the past heavy losses, and spoke
gleefully of the paltry five hundred he had just scooped in.

The girl looked relieved, and even the undemonstrative "Lord" Bill
allowed a scarcely audible sigh to escape him. Jacky returned at once to
the exigencies of the moment.

"Then, uncle, dear, let us hurry up. I guess none of us want to be
caught in a blizzard. Say, Bill, take me to the cloak-room, right
away."

CHAPTER II

THE BLIZZARD: ITS CONSEQUENCES

On the whole, Canada can boast of one of the most perfect health-giving
climates in the world, despite the two extremes of heat and cold of
which it is composed. But even so, the Canadian climate is cursed by an
evil which every now and again breaks loose from the bonds which fetter
it, and rages from east to west, carrying death and destruction in its
wake. I speak of the terrible--the raging Blizzard!

To appreciate the panic-like haste with which the Foss River Settlement
party left the ballroom, one must have lived a winter in the west of
Canada. The reader who sits snugly by his or her fireside, and who has
never experienced a Canadian winter, can have no conception of one of
those dread storms, the very name of which had drawn words of terror
from one who had lived the greater part of her life in the eastern
shadow of the Rockies. Hers was no timid, womanly fear for ordinary
inclemency of weather, but a deep-rooted dread of a life-and-death
struggle in a merciless storm, than which, in no part of the world, can
there be found a more fearful. Whence it comes--and why, surely no one
may say. A meteorological expert may endeavor to account for it, but his
argument is unconvincing and gains no credence from the dweller on the
prairies. And why? Because the storm does not come from above--neither
does it come from a specified direction. And only in the winter does
such a wind blow. The wind buffets fr