inting senses; he knew he should hold to life as long as he
could think of her. Love, stronger than death, welled in his heart.
The bitter cold and the merciless wind were kinder as he called her
image from out of the storm. She seemed to speak--to lift him in her
arms. Ahead, distant mountains rose, white-peaked. The sun shone. He
rode with her through green fields, and a great peace rested on his
weary senses.

* * * * *

Lady Jane, pushing on and on, enlightened by that instinct before
which the reason of man is weak and pitiful, seeing, as it were,
through the impenetrable curtain of the storm where refuge lay,
herself a slow-moving crust of frozen snow, dragged to her journey's
end--to the tight-shut doors of the Calabasas barn--her unconscious
burden, and stood before them patiently waiting until some one should
open for her. It was one of the heartbreaks of a tragic day that no
one ever knew just when the Lady reached the door or how long she and
her unconscious master waited in the storm for admission. A startled
exclamation from John Lefever, who had periodically and anxiously
left the red-hot stove in the office to walk moodily to the window,
brought the men tumbling over one another as he ran from his
companions to throw open the outer door and pull the drooping horse
into the barn.

It was the Indian, Scott, who, reading first of all the men everything
in the dread story, sprang forward with a stifled exclamation, as the
horse dragged in the snow-covered log, whipped a knife from his
pocket, cut the incumbered arm and white hand free from the
whiffletree and, carrying the stiffened body into the office, began
with insane haste to cut away the clothing.

Lefever, perceiving it was de Spain thus drawn to their feet, shouted,
while he tore from the blade of Scott's knife the frozen garments, the
orders for the snow, the heated water, the warm blankets, the alcohol
and brandy, and, stripped to his waist, chafed the marble feet. The
Indian, better than a staff of doctors, used the cunning of a sorcerer
to revive the spark of inanimate life not yet extinguished by the
storm. A fearful interval of suspense followed the silence into which
the work settled, a silence broken only by the footsteps of men
running to and from the couch over which Scott, Lefever, and McAlpin,
half-naked, worked in mad concert.

De Spain opened his eyes to wander from one to the other of the