ee horses the clearest instinct to bring her through the fight
for the lives that were at stake. He did not deceive himself with the
idea he could do anything to help the beast find a way to succor; that
instinct rested wholly in the Lady's head, not in his. He only knew
that if she could not get back to help, he could not. His own part in
the effort was quite outside any aid to the Lady--it was no more than
to reach alive whatever aid she could find, that he might direct it to
where Nan and her companion would endure a few hours longer the fury
of the storm.

His own struggle for life, he realized, was with the wind--the roaring
wind that hurled its broadsides of frozen snow in monstrous waves
across the maddened sky, challenging every living thing. It drove icy
knives into his face and ears, paralyzed in its swift grasp his
muscles and sinews, fought the stout flow of blood through his veins,
and searched his very heart to still it.

Encouraging the Lady with kind words, and caressing her in her groping
efforts as she turned head and tail from the blinding sheets of snow
and ice, de Spain let her drift, hoping she might bring them through,
what he confessed in his heart to be, the narrowest of chances.

He bent low in his saddle under the unending blasts. He buffeted his
legs and arms to fight off the fatal cold. He slipped more than once
from his seat, and with a hand on the pommel tramped beside the horse
to revive his failing circulation; there would come a time, he
realized, when he could no longer climb up again, but he staved that
issue off to the last possible moment of endurance, because the Lady
made better time when he was on her back. When the struggle to remount
had been repeated until nature could no longer by any staggering
effort be made to respond to his will, until his legs were no longer a
part of his benumbed being--until below his hips he had no body
answerable to his commands, but only two insensible masses of lead
that anchored him to the ground--he still forced the frozen feet to
carry him, in a feeble, monstrous gait beside the Lady, while he
dragged with his hands on the saddle for her patient aid.

One by one every thought, as if congealed in their brain cells,
deserted his mind--save the thought that he must not freeze to death.
More than once he had hoped the insensate fury of the blizzard might
abate. The Lady had long since ceased to try to face it--like a
stripped vessel before a hur