up the steep foot-trail that climbed the slope with it. He
was more or less accustomed to carrying bags of grain between store and
waggon, but his mittened hands were numbed, and his joints were stiff
with frost just then, and Sally noticed that he floundered rather
wildly. In another moment or two, however, he vanished into the gloom
among the trees, and she sat listening to the uneven crunch of his
footsteps in the snow, until there was a sudden crash of broken
branches, and a sound as of something falling heavily down a declivity.
Then there was another crash, and stillness again.

Sally gasped, and clenched her mittened hands hard upon the reins as
she remembered that Lorton's bye trail skirted the edge of a very steep
bank, but she lost neither her collectedness nor her nerve. Presence
of mind in the face of an emergency is probably as much a question of
experience as of temperament, and, as it happened, she had, like other
women in that country, seen men struck down by half-trained horses,
crushed by collapsing strawpiles, and once or twice gashed by a mower
blade. This was no doubt why she remembered that the impatient team
would probably move on if she left the sleigh, and she drove them to
the first of the birches before she got down. Then she knotted the
reins about a branch, and called out sharply.

No answer came out of the shadows, and her heart beat unpleasantly fast
as she plunged in among the trees, keeping below the narrow trail that
went slanting up the side of the declivity, until she stopped, with
another gasp, when she reached a spot where a ray of moonlight came
filtering down. A limp figure in an old skin coat lay almost at her
feet, and she dropped on her knees beside it in the snow. Hawtrey's
face showed an unpleasant greyish-white in the faint silvery light.

"Gregory!" she cried hoarsely.

The man opened his eyes, and blinked at her in a half-dazed manner.
"Fell down," he said. "Think I felt my leg go--and my side's stabbing
me. Go for somebody."

Sally glanced round, and noticed that the grain bag lay burst open not
far away. She fancied that he had clung to it after he lost his
footing, which explained why he had fallen so heavily, but that was not
a point of any consequence now. There was nobody who could help her
within two leagues of the spot, and it was evident that she could not
leave him there to freeze. Then she noticed that the trees grew rather
farther apart just t