hs it had not snowed, for the moisture had
all been squeezed from the air, leaving it crisp, brilliant, sparkling.
Now the sun, long hesitant, at last began to swing up the sky. Far south
the warmer airs of spring were awakening the Kansas fields. Here in the
barren country the steel sky melted to a haze. During the day, when the
sun was up, the surface of the snow even softened a little, and a very
perceptible warmth allowed them to rest, their parkas thrown back,
without discomfort.

The men noticed this, and knew it as the precursor of the spring
snow-fall. Dick grew desperately uneasy, desperately anxious to push on,
to catch up before the complete obliteration of the trail, when his
resources would perforce run out for lack of an object to which to apply
them. He knew perfectly well that this must be what the Indian had
anticipated, the reason why he had dared to go out into the barren
grounds, and to his present helpless lack of a further expedient the
defaulter's confidence in the natural sequence seemed only too well
justified. Sam remained inscrutable.

The expected happened late one afternoon. All day the haze had
thickened, until at last, without definite transition, it had become a
cloud covering the entire sky. Then it had snowed. The great, clogging
flakes sifted down gently, ziz-zagging through the air like so many
pieces of paper. They impacted softly against the world, standing away
from each other and from the surface on which they alighted by the full
stretch of their crystal arms. In an hour three inches had fallen. The
hollows and depressions were filling to the level; the Trail was growing
indistinct.

Dick watched from the shelter of a growing despair. Never had he felt so
helpless. This thing was so simple, yet so effective; and nothing he
could do would nullify its results. As sometimes in a crisis a man will
give his whole attention to a trivial thing, so Dick fastened his gaze
on a single snow-shoe track on the edge of a covered bowlder. By it he
gauged the progress of the storm. When at last even his imagination
could not differentiate it from the surface on either side, he looked
up. The visible world was white and smooth and level. No faintest trace
of the Trail remained. East, west, north, south, lay uniformity. The
Indian had disappeared utterly from the face of the earth.

The storm lightened and faint streaks of light shot through the clouds.

"Well, let's be moving," said Sam.