.

By noon she was faint and sick and had to stop often to rest, her legs
shaking under her. Again she made a scant meal. She had stumbled on a
tiny field of wild potatoes and ate what she could of them, thinking
longingly of a match for a fire. The match which Ruth had dropped she
still had, but she carefully reserved it now, thinking how perhaps a
trout, caught in a pool, might save her life.

In her already half-starved condition and with the demands constantly
put on her strength, she would grow weaker and weaker if help did not
soon come. But she was still filled with the glory of freedom.

It was a heart-weary, trembling Judith who late that afternoon made her
way upward along another ridge, seeking anxiously to find from this
lookout some landmark which she had sought in vain last night. In her
blouse were the few roots she had brought with her from the field
discovered at noon. Lying in a little patch of dry grass, resting, she
watched the day go down and the night drift into the mountains, filling
the ravines, creeping up the slopes, rising slowly to the peak to which
she had climbed, seeping into her soul. Never had the passing of the
day seemed to her so majestic a thing, truly filled with awe. Never
until now had the solitudes seemed so vast, so utterly, stupendously
big. Never until now, as she lay staring up into the limitless sky,
having given up the world about her as unknown, had she drunk to the
lees of the cup of loneliness.

So great was the weariness of her tired body that as she lay still,
watching the stars come out one by one, she was half-resigned to lie so
and let death come to find her. It seemed to her that there in the
rude arms of Mother Earth a human life was a matter of no greater
consequence than the down upon a moth's wing. But she rested a little
and this mood, foreign to her intrepid heart, passed, and she sat up,
again resolute, again ready to make her fight as long as life beat
through her blood. At last she took the one match from her pocket.
She scarcely dared breathe when, with dry grass and twigs piled against
a rock, her dress shielding them from the wind, she rubbed the match
softly against her boot. A sputtering flame, making the blue light of
burning sulphur, died down, creating panic in her breast, then flared,
crackled, licked at the grass. She had a fire and she knew how to use
it!

When a log was blazing, assuring her that her fire was safe, she rose