needed kitchen utensils. True, he needed some things
himself, but his needs could wait. And then there were other things.
Oh, he knew what to get. He hadn't been having little conferences
with Mrs. Morrison for nothing...A tender smile gently suffused his
face, and his cheery whistle soared above the rumble of the
wagon-wheels on the hard lumps of the trail.

Ten days later he retraced his course in the teeth of a blinding
blizzard. A dozen times he had been lost in the last forty-eight
hours, but he had developed the prairie-dweller's sense of direction,
and had always been able again to locate the trail. The Arthurs would
have detained him, almost by force, but the thought of a pale,
patient face, wrung with an agony of anxiety not for itself, made him
adamant in his resolve to go home at whatever cost. The roads were
almost impassable; he left his lumber at Arthurs', but carried with
him his window, a few boards for a door, and a little bundle of
drygoods. Everything else had gone by the way, surrendered in
exchange for food and shelter for himself and horses.

It was not dreadfully cold, but the sky seemed only a vast turmoil of
snow. The north-west wind pelted the flakes in his face, where they
melted with the warmth of his skin and again drooped in tenacious
icicles from his eyebrows and moustache. The horses, too, were half
blinded with the storm, and the empty wagon dragged laboriously
through the deep drifts. Darkness came down very early, but at last
Harris began to recognize familiar landmarks close by the trail, and
just as night was settling in he drew into the partial shelter of the
bench on the bank of the coulee. The horses pulled on their reins
persistently for the stable, but Harris forced them up to the house.
His loud shout was whipped away by the wind and strangled in a
moment, so he climbed stiffly from the wagon and pulled with numbed
hands at the double thickness of carpet that did service for a door.
He fancied he heard a sound, but could be sure of nothing; he called
her name again and again, but could distinguish no answer. But at
last the fastenings which held the carpet gave way, and he half
walked, half fell, into the house.

The lantern burned dimly, but it was not at the lantern he looked. In
the farthest corner, scarcely visible in the feeble light, stood his
wife, and at her shoulder was the gun, trained steadily upon him.

"Mary, Mary, don't you know me?" he cried.

She dropped h