one of them would
surely see the red glow of the fire, and discovery now meant death. In
the edge of the trees, where the shadows were deep, he paused and
looked back. His hand fumbled where the left-pocket of his coat would
have been, and as he listened to the crackling of the flames and stared
into the heart of the red glow there smote him with sudden and
sickening force a realization of their deadliest peril. In that
twisting inferno of burning pitch was his coat, and in the left-hand
pocket of that coat WERE HIS MATCHES!

Fire! Out there in the open a seething, twisting mass of it, taunting
him with its power, mocking him as pitiless as the mirage mocks a
thirst-crazed creature of the desert. In an hour or two it would be
gone. He might keep up its embers for a time--until the Eskimos, or
starvation, or still greater storm put an end to it. The effort, in any
event, would be futile in the end. Their one chance lay in finding the
other cabin, and reaching it quickly. When it came to the point of
absolute necessity he could at least try to make fire as he had seen an
Indian make it once, though at the time he had regarded the achievement
as a miracle born of unnumbered generations of practice.

He heard the glad note of welcome in Celie's throat when he returned to
her. She spoke his name. It seemed to him that there was no note of
fear in her voice, but just gladness that he had come back to her in
that pit of darkness. He bent down and tucked her snugly in the big
bear-skin before he took her up in his arms again. He held her so that
her face was snuggled close against his neck, and he kissed her soft
mouth again, and whispered to her as he began picking his way through
the forest. His voice, whispering, made her understand that they must
make no sound. She was tightly imprisoned in the skin, but all at once
he felt one of her hands work its way out of the warmth of it and lay
against his cheek. It did not move away from his face. Out of her soul
and body there passed through that contact of her hand the confession
that made him equal to fighting the world. For many minutes after that
neither of them spoke. The moan of the wind was growing less and less
in the treetops, and once Philip saw a pale break where the clouds had
split asunder in the sky. The storm was at an end--and it was almost
dawn. In a quarter of an hour the shot like snow of the blizzard had
changed to big soft flakes that dropped straight out of t