he stable? I've heard tell, ma'am, that
broncho tenderloin is a favorite dish with them there French chiefs
that do the cooking. They kinder trim it up so's it's 'most as good as
frawgs' legs."

Sheba had never before slept on bare boards with a sealskin coat for a
sleeping-bag. But she was very tired and dropped off almost instantly.
Twice she woke during the night, disturbed by the stiffness and the
pain of her body. It seemed to her that the hard, whipsawed planks were
pushing through the soft flesh to the bones. She was cold, too, and
crept closer to the stout Swedish woman lying beside her. Presently she
fell asleep again to the sound of the blizzard howling outside. When she
wakened for the third time it was morning.

In the afternoon the blizzard died away. As far as she could see, Sheba
looked out upon a waste of snow. Her eyes turned from the desolation
without to the bare and cheerless room in which they had found shelter.
In spite of herself a little shiver ran down the spine of the girl. Had
she come into this Arctic solitude to find her tomb?

Resolutely she brushed the gloomy thought from her mind and began to
chat with Mrs. Olson. In a corner of the cabin Sheba had found a torn
and disreputable copy of "Vanity Fair." The covers and the first forty
pages were gone. A splash of what appeared to be tobacco juice defiled
the last sheet. But the fortunes of Becky and Amelia had served to make
her forget during the morning that she was hungry and likely to be much
hungrier before another day had passed.

As soon as the storm had moderated enough to let him go out with
safety, Swiftwater Pete had taken one of the horses for an attempt at
trail-breaking.

"Me, I'm after that plum pudding. I gotta get a feed of oats from the
stage for my bronchs too. The scenery here is sure fine, but it ain't
what you would call nourishing. Huh! Watch our smoke when me and old
Baldface git to bucking them drifts."

He had been gone two hours and the early dusk was already descending
over the white waste when Sheba ventured out to see what had become of
the stage-driver. But the cold was so bitter that she soon gave up the
attempt to fight her way through the drifts and turned back to the
cabin.

Sometime later Swiftwater Pete came stumbling into their temporary home.
He was fagged to exhaustion but triumphant. Upon the table he dropped
from the crook of his numbed arm two packages.

"The makings for a Christmas dinner,"