Part 24 (1/2)

As soon as the light came, he could mush on toward his Twenty-three Mile cabin It would be a cold and exhausting ht was bitter now, assailing hie the moment he left the warm cabin; and the temperature would continue to fall until after dawn The wind still blew the snow dust--a stinging lash froht the cold froht could be so cold Yet when he opened his eyes he could not see the gleam of a star The red coals of the fire, too, were smothered and obscured in ashes He stepped toward the to rake them up for such heat as they could yield

Presently he halted, gazing with fascinated horror at the ground

He was suddenly struck with a ghastly and terrible possibility He could not give it credence, yet the thought seereat cold But he would know the truth in a moment It was always his creed: not to spare hi story--this of his great fear--when he returned with his backload of supplies to Virginia So to talk about, in the painful and einia and her lover went out of his sight forever

His hand groped for a ers as he tried to strike it But soon he found another

He heard it crack in the silence, but evidently it was a dud! The darkness before his eyes remained unbroken

Filled with a sick fear, he relove and passed his hand over the upheld er a possibility for doubt The tiny flame smarted his flesh

”Blind!” he cried ”Out here in the snow and the forest--blind!”

It was true The pungent wood smoke had done a cruel work Until time should heal the wounds of the tortured lenses, Bill was blind

XXIII

Standing loo cold, Bill made hier blunt and dull It was cool, analytic; he balanced one thing against another; he judged the per cent of his chance At present it did not occur to hiive up It is never the way of the sons of the wilderness to yield without a fight They know life in all its travail and pain, but also they know the Cold and Darkness and Fear that is death No hts to his last breath Bill had always fought; his life had been a great war of which birth was the reveille and death would be retreat

He holly self-contained, his ure it all out and seek the best way through Long, weary miles of trackless forest stretched between him and safety There was no food in this cabin, no blankets; and the fire was out His Twenty-three Mile cabin was only slightly less distant than the one he had left And through those endless drifts and interminable forests the blind, unaided, could not find their way

He could conceive of no circuinia and Harold would coht They did not expect him back until the end of the present day; they could not possible start forth to seek hiht And this man knehat the forest and the cold would do to hi to him

For all that he had no food, he knew that if he could keep warm he could survive until help came Yet men cannot fast in these winter woods as they can in the South The simpleBut he had no blankets, and without a fire he would die, speedily and surely He didn't deceive himself on this point He knew the northern winter only too well A few hours of suffering, then a sloarh the veins and was the herald of departure He had been warh in the cabin, but that warmth would soon pass away He wondered if he could rebuild the fire

He was suddenly shaken with terror at the thought that already he did not knohat direction the fire and the cabin lay He had becoht the an to search for the cabin door He went down on his hands in the snow, groping, then moved in a slow, careful circle Just one little second's bewilderht lose the cabin altogether That

But in a moment the smoke blew into his face, and he advanced into the ashes The next ain, he found the cabin door He leaned against it, breathing hard

”It won't do, Bill,” he told hi, the last segment of the tree he had cut, lay somewhere a few feet from his door But he rereen: could he find it now? The log would not burn until it was cut up with his ax: the ax would be hard to find in the pressing darkness Even if he found it, even if he could cut kindling with his knife, he couldn't reen timber is a cruel task even with vision; and he kneell as he knew the fact of his own life that it would be wholly impossible to the blind

Then as left? Only a deeper, colder darkness than this he kne Death was left--nothing else In an hour, perhaps in a half-hour, possibly not until the night had gone and coain with its wind and its chill, the end would be the sauide hiht seized upon an idea so fantastic, seely so iive it credence

His mind had flashed to those unfortunates that had soround cavern and thence to that er Thesethe the-end here, but he had made a trail!

His snowshoe tracks probably were not yet obliterated under the wind-blown snow Could he feel his way along the, but he wouldn't have to creep on hands and knees all the way Perhaps he could walk, stooped, touching the depressions in the snow at every step In his own soul he did not believe that he had one chance in a hundred offrom track to track would wear him out quickly But was there any other course for him? If he didn't try that, would he have any alternative other than to lie still and die? He wasn't sure that he could even find the tracks in the snow, but if he were able to encircle the cabin at a radius of fifty feet he could not roped about at the side of the cabin for his snowshoes

He found theht as he could fifty feet out fro in the icy snow He started to reat circle

Fifteen feet farther he felt a break in the even surface The snow had been so soft and his shoes had sunk so deep that the powdered flakes the wind had strewn during the night had only half filled his tracks He started to follow the with one hand, and after an endless tiers dipped into dry, warm ashes