ight came, very likely, and then she could
quickly get her bearings. She thought this over and over, and over and
over again monotonously, while somehow the interminable hours of dumb
misery passed.

Daylight! Daylight! And when the first leaden light came she was afraid
to believe it. It was faint, just enough to show that somewhere the sun
was shining, yet her chilled blood stirred hopefully. But there was no
warmth in the dawn, the storm did not abate, and at an hour which she
judged to be around nine o'clock she was able to make out only the sheep
in her immediate vicinity, snow encrusted, huddled together with heads
lowered, and drifting, always drifting. She had no notion where she was,
and to leave the sheep was to lose them. No, she must have patience and
patience and more patience. At noon it would lighten surely--it nearly
always did--and she had only to hold out a little longer.

The top of the sagebrush made black dots on the white surface, and there
were comparatively bare places where she dared sit down and rest a few
moments, but mostly it was drifts now--drifts where she floundered and
the sheep sunk down and stood stupidly until pushed forward by those
behind them.

Twelve o'clock came and there was no change save that the drifts were
higher and she could see a little farther into the white wilderness.

"What if--what if--" she gulped, for the thought brought a contraction
of the throat muscles that made swallowing difficult. "What if there
were twenty-four more of it!" Could she stand it? She was tired to
exhaustion with walking, with the strain of resisting the cold, and the
all-night vigil--weak, too, with hunger.

Was she to become another of those that the first chinook uncovered? One
of the already large army that have paid with their lives in just such
circumstances for their loyalty, or their bad judgment? After all she
had gone through to reach the goal she had set for herself was she to go
out like this--like a common herder who had no thought or ambition
beyond the debauch when he drew his wages?

When the dimming light told her the afternoon was waning, and then
indications of darkness and another night of torture, despair filled
her. Numb, hungry, her vitality at low ebb, she doubted her ability to
weather it. Was she being punished, she wondered, for protesting against
the life the Fates appeared to have mapped out for her? Was this futile
inane end coming to her because since that d