peril from the increasing chill, so that Jim
dared not sleep lest he should never wake again, but die benumbed and
exhausted! Yet Arrowhead slept through all. Day after day so, and then ten
miles of storm such as come only to the vast barrens of the northlands;
and woe to the traveller upon whom the icy wind and the blinding snow
descended! Woe came upon Jim Templeton and Arrowhead, the heathen.

In the awful struggle between man and nature that followed, the captive
became the leader. The craft of the plains, the inherent instinct, the
feeling which was more than eyesight became the only hope. One whole day
to cover ten miles--an endless path of agony, in which Jim went down again
and again, but came up blinded by snow and drift, and cut as with lashes
by the angry wind. At the end of the ten miles was a Hudson Bay Company's
post and safety; and through ten hours had the two struggled toward it,
going off at tangents, circling on their own tracks; but the Indian, by an
instinct as sure as the needle to the pole, getting the direction to the
post again, in the moments of direst peril and uncertainty. To Jim the
world became a sea of maddening forces which buffeted him; a whirlpool of
fire in which his brain was tortured, his mind was shrivelled up; a vast
army rending itself, each man against the other. It was a purgatory of
music, broken by discords; and then at last--how sweet it all was, after
the eternity of misery!--"Church bells and voices low," and Sally singing
to him, Nancy's voice calling! Then, nothing but sleep--sleep, a sinking
down millions of miles in an ether of drowsiness which thrilled him; and
after--no more.

None who has suffered up to the limit of what the human body and soul may
bear can remember the history of those distracted moments when the
struggle became one between the forces in nature and the forces in man,
between agonized body and smothered mind, yet with the divine intelligence
of the created being directing, even though subconsciously, the fight.

How Arrowhead found the post in the mad storm he could never have told.
Yet he found it, with Jim unconscious on the sledge and with limbs frozen,
all the dogs gone but two, the leathers over the Indian's shoulders as he
fell against the gate of the post with a shrill cry that roused the factor
and his people within, together with Sergeant Sewell, who had been sent
out from headquarters to await Jim's arrival there. It was Sewell's hand
whic