ent. He was glad that the trial was over. He knew a
deep, infinite peace.

Sleep was encroaching upon him now. He felt himself drifting, and the
tide would never bring him back. He stirred a little, putting his hands
in his armpits, his face resting on his elbow. The wind swept by,
sobbing: there in the shadow of death he caught its tones and its
messages as never before. He was being swept into space. ...

On the trail that he had made on the out-journey, and which he had tried
to vainly to follow back, Virginia came mushing toward him. Never
before had her muscles responded so obediently to her will; she sped at
a pace that she had never traveled before. It was as if some power
above herself was bearing her along, swiftly, easily, with never a
wasted motion. She tilted the nose of her snowshoes just the right
angle, no more or less, and all her muscles seemed to work in perfect
unison.

The bitter cold of the early morning hours only made her blood flow
faster and gave her added energy. She scarcely felt the pack on her
back. The snowshoe trail, however, was so faint as to be almost
invisible.

Because the snow had been firm in this part of Bill's journey, his track
was not so deep and the drifting snow had almost completely filled it.
In a few places the track was entirely obscured; always there were
merely dim indentations. If she had started an hour later she could not
have followed the trail at all. For all the day was clear, the wind
still whirled flurries of dry snow across her path.

But she didn't permit herself to despair. If need be, she told herself,
she would follow him clear to the Twenty-three Mile cabin. The tracks
were ever more dim, but surely they would be deeper again where Bill had
encountered the soft snow.

It became increasingly probable, however, that the tracks would
completely fade away before that time. Soon the difficulty of finding
the imprints in the snow began to slacken her gait. To lose them
completely meant failure: she could not find her way in these snowy
stretches unguided. As morning reached its full, the white wastes
seemed to stretch unbroken.

Was the wind-blown snow going to defeat her purpose, after all? A great
weight of fear and disappointment began to assail her. The truth of the
matter was she had come to an exposed slope, and the trail had faded out
under the snow dust.

At first there seemed nothing to do but turn back. It might be
possib