ing smote them with tenfold cruelty.

All night the north wind shouted, and, as the next day waned with its
violence undiminished, the frost crept in upon them till they rolled
and tossed shivering. Twice they essayed to crawl out, but were driven
back to cower for endless, hopeless hours.

It is in such black, aimless times that thought becomes distorted.
Willard felt his mind wandering through bleak dreams and tortured
fancies, always to find himself harping on his early argument with
Pierre: "It's the mind that counts." Later he roused to the fact that
his knees, where they pressed against the bag, were frozen; also his
feet were numb and senseless. In his acquired consciousness he knew
that along the course of his previous mental vagary lay madness, and
the need of action bore upon him imperatively.

He shouted to his mate, but "Wild" Pierre seemed strangely apathetic.

"We've got to run for it at daylight. We're freezing. Here! Hold on!
What are you doing? Wait for daylight!" Pierre had scrambled stiffly
out of his cover and his gabblings reached Willard. He raised a
clenched fist into the darkness of the streaming night, cursing
horribly with words that appalled the other.

"Man! man! don't curse your God. This is bad enough as it is. Cover
up. Quick!"

Although apparently unmindful of his presence, the other crawled back
muttering.

As the dim morning greyed the smother they rose and fought their way
downward toward the valley. Long since they had lost their griping
hunger, and now held only an apathetic indifference to food, with a
cringing dread of the cold and a stubborn sense of their extreme
necessity.

They fell many times, but gradually drew themselves more under control,
the exercise suscitating them, as they staggered downward, blinded and
buffeted, their only hope the road-house.

Willard marvelled dully at the change in Pierre. His face had
shrivelled to blackened freezes stretched upon a bony substructure, and
lighted by feverish, glittering, black, black eyes. It seemed to him
that his own lagging body had long since failed, and that his aching,
naked soul wandered stiffly through the endless day. As night
approached Pierre stopped frequently, propping himself with legs far
apart; sometimes he laughed. Invariably this horrible sound shocked
Willard into a keener sense of the surroundings, and it grew to
irritate him, for the Frenchman's mental wanderings increased with the