In about
an hour his driver, Padarin, came back to me with a frightened look in
his face, and said that Mr. Leet was dead; that he had shaken him and
called him several times, but could get no reply. Alarmed and shocked,
I sprang from my sledge and ran up to the place where he lay, shouted
to him, shook him by the shoulder, and tried to uncover his head,
which he had drawn down into the body of his fur coat. In a moment, to
my great relief, I heard his voice, saying that he was all right and
could hold out, if necessary, until night; that he had not answered
Padarin because it was too much trouble, but that I need not be
alarmed about his safety; and then I thought he added something about
"worse storms in the Sierra Nevadas," which convinced me that he
was far from being used up yet. As long as he could insist upon the
superiority of Californian storms, there was certainly hope.

Early in the afternoon we reached the Yamsk River and, after wandering
about for an hour or two in the timber, came upon one of Lieutenant
Arnold's Yakut working-parties and were conducted to their camp, only
a few miles from the settlement. Here we obtained some rye bread and
hot tea, warmed our benumbed limbs, and partially cleared the snow out
of our clothing. When I saw Mr. Leet undressed I wondered that he had
not died. While squatting out on the ground during the storm of the
previous night, snow in great quantities had blown in at his neck,
had partially melted with the warmth of his body, and had then frozen
again in a mass of ice along his whole spine, and in that condition he
had lived to be driven twenty versts. Nothing but a strong will and
the most intense vitality enabled him to hold out during these last
six dismal hours. When we had warmed, rested, and dried ourselves at
the camp-fire of the Yakuts, we resumed our journey, and late in the
afternoon we drove into the settlement of Yamsk, after thirteen
days of harder experience than usually falls to the lot of Siberian
travellers, Mr. Leet so soon recovered his strength and spirits that
three days afterwards he started for Okhotsk, where the Major wished
him to take charge of a gang of Yakut labourers. The last words that I
remember to have ever heard him speak were those which he shouted to
me in the storm and darkness of that gloomy night on the Malkachan
steppe: "What would our mothers say if they could see us now?" The
poor fellow was afterwards driven insane by excitements