and denser grew the gloom, and now there
was a roaring as of a great wind. King Blizzard was come.

"I guess I'm done for," he hissed through clenched teeth. "But I'll
fight to the finish. I'll die game."

CHAPTER XI

It was on him now with a swoop and a roar. He was in the thick of a
mud-grey darkness, a bitter, blank darkness full of whirling wind-eddies
and vast flurries of snow. He could not see more than a few feet before
him. The stinging flakes blinded him; the coal-black night engulfed him.
In that seething turmoil of the elements he was as helpless as a child.

"I guess you're on your last trail, Jack Locasto," he muttered grimly.

Nevertheless he lowered his head and butted desperately into the heart
of the storm. He was very faint from lack of food, but despair had given
him a new strength, and he plunged through drift and flurry with the
fury of a goaded bull.

The night had fallen black as the pit. He was in an immensity of
darkness, a darkness that packed close up to him, and hugged him, and
enfolded him like a blanket. And in the black void winds were raging
with an insane fury, whirling aloft mountains of snow and hurling them
along plain and valley. The forests shrieked in fear; the creatures of
the Wild cowered in their lairs, but the solitary man stumbled on and
on. As if by magic barriers of snow piled up before him, and almost to
his shoulders he floundered through them. The wind had a hatchet edge
that pierced his clothes and hacked him viciously. He knew his only
plan was to keep moving, to stumble, stagger on. It was a fight for
life.

He had forgotten his hunger. Those wild visions of gluttony had gone
from him. He had forgotten his thirst for revenge, forgotten everything
but his own dire peril.

"Keep moving, keep moving for God's sake," he urged himself hoarsely.
"You'll freeze if you let up a moment. Don't let up, don't!"

But oh, how hard it was not to rest! Every muscle in his body seemed to
beg and pray for rest, yet the spirit in him drove them to work anew. He
was making a certain mad headway, travelling, always travelling. He
doubted not he was doomed, but instinct made him fight on as long as an
atom of strength remained.

He floundered to his armpits in a snowdrift. He struggled out and
staggered on once more. In the mad buffoonery of that cutting wind he
scarce could stand upright. His parka was frozen stiff as a board. He
could feel his hands grow numb in his mi