th a lot of ungrammatical, roughly clad men, and of
having no maid to serve her and not even the comfort of privacy,
loomed large in the mind of Mrs. Singleton Corey. Never before in her
life had she drunk coffee with condensed cream in it, or eaten burned
bread with stale butter, and boiled beans and bacon. Never before had
she shared the bed of another woman, or slept in a borrowed nightgown
that was too tight in the arms. To Mrs. Singleton Corey these things
bore all the earmarks of tragedy.

But the next day real tragedy pushed small discomforts back into their
proper perspective. It still stormed, though not so furiously, and
with fitful spells of sunlight breaking through the churning clouds.
The men left the cabin at daylight, and Mrs. Singleton Corey found
herself practically compelled to wash the dishes and sweep the floor
and wait on the distracted Kate who was crushed under the realization
of Mrs. Singleton Corey's disgust at her surroundings. Conversation
languished that day. Mrs. Singleton Corey sat in a straight-backed
chair and stared out of the window that faced the little basin, and
waited for Jack to come. She had suffered much, and she felt that fate
owed her a speedy return of the prodigal.

Instead of that they brought Hank Brown to the cabin, dead on a
makeshift stretcher. When the shock of that had passed a little, so
that her mind could digest details, Mrs. Singleton Corey learned, with
a terrible, vise-like contraction of the heart, that Hank had climbed
ahead of the others and had almost reached the place they called
Taylor Rock, where Jack was said to have his cave. Those below had
heard a rifle shot, and they had climbed up to find Hank stretched
dead in the snow. Two men had searched the vicinity as well as they
could, but they had found nothing at all. The snow, they said, was
drifted twenty feet deep in some places.

They did not tell her what they thought about it, but Mrs. Singleton
Corey knew. And Kate knew. And the two women's eyes would not meet,
after that, and their voices were constrained, their words formal when
they found it necessary to have speech with each other.

Mrs. Singleton Corey forgot the crudities and the discomforts of
Toll-Gate cabin after that. She watched the trail, and her eyes
questioned dumbly every man that came in for rest and food before
going out again to the search. They always went again, fighting their
way through the storm that never quite cleared. T