n the floor.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE VOICE IN THE HURRICANE

Their sufferings, as the days went crawling into weeks, attained a
certain dead level of wretchedness. At that level, should nothing
worse befall, they felt that they might exist through the eight months
of their imprisonment; beyond that level lay deliverance by death. So
they kept a painstaking account of time, and made a sort of solemn
ceremony of that hour when, as night let down its black curtain before
the entrance of the cavern, Marion cut another notch in the wall, and
they clasped hands in a brave effort at good cheer, and said to each
other, "One more! One more!"

The cold had steadily increased until it was just barely endurable. By
day it was possible to combat it in some measure, but at night they
were stung and tortured by the frost that invaded the cave, and defied
their meager clothing. If they tried lying closely side by side with
their blankets spread over them, the cold crept under the coverings,
and bit through their garments into their emaciated limbs. If they
wrapped themselves tightly in the blankets, one pair to each, and lay
near the fire, they were able to catch only a few fitful moments of
sleep before the frost on one side and the heat on the other forced
them to move.

At inexorable intervals the fire must be replenished. Heavy with sleep
that was not sleep, feeble from lack of nourishment, and stiff from
cold, Marion would rise and stumble to the nearest heap of wood, and
carefully lay two or three pieces on the dying embers. The fire itself
was to Marion a source of continual dread; for not only did it consume
their precious and unrenewable supply of wood with a terrifying
voracity, but she was fairly obsessed by the fear that she might let
it go out. In that event they might never waken, clutched by the cold
in their sleep; or wakening, find that something had happened to the
matches. There remained a good store of these in the box enfolded
carefully in a bit of cloth and a strip of deerskin, and bestowed in a
high niche of the cavern; but there was sometimes moisture in the
night winds, and there could be no absolute assurance that the matches
would ignite in an emergency.

The winds blew irregularly, sometimes roaring through the cave, and
filling it with a whirl of smoke and snow, and sometimes creeping
along the floor with the malevolence and stealthiness of a serpent.
Marion had blocked up the entrance with smal