sense!" he cried irritably. "A flurry of snow can't
hurt anybody! It'll turn into rain directly!"

She shrugged, and said no more.

The mute symphony of the snow was played imperceptibly accelerando. The
flakes became smaller, and thicker, and dryer; and each gust of wind was
a hint steadier and stronger than the last. Their radius of view was
little by little restricted: the distant hills faded out of sight, and
the white dome closed over and around them, until at last they seemed to
be traversing a little island of firm ground, with edges crumbling into
a misty void. Presently the ground, too, was overlaid with white; earth
and sky commingled indistinguishably; and all that held them to earth
was the quadruple line of black hoof-marks extending a little way
behind. The horses sulked and hung their heads.

They came to another and a shallower coulee, which seemed to take a
northeasterly direction across the prairie; whereas all the watercourses
they had crossed hitherto tended to the southeast. Garth, on the watch
for any such evidences, suspected they had crossed a height of land. On
the other side of this coulee he found he could no longer trace the
passage of the preceding cavalcade under the thickening snow. He
impatiently called on Rina; but she merely shrugged, refusing to look.

"No can follow in the snow!" she said contemptuously.

At every hint of stoppage, Garth's blood surged dangerously upward. He
pressed his knuckles against his temples, and strove to think. The two
horses, instinctively drawing close together, turned their tails to the
driving flakes. Rina sat hunched in her saddle, as indifferent as a
squat, clay image.

"I will ride on," he said thickly.

She gave no sign.

He consulted his compass. "We have ridden due northwest all the way," he
said. "Where are they heading for?"

"Death River, I guess," she answered, pointing. "The crossing is
northwest."

"How far?" he demanded.

"Two days' journey, maybe seventy-five miles."

"You wait for the boy in the shelter of the poplar bluff across the
coulee," he said. "When the snow stops, follow on as well as you can."

"Charley not come any more," said Rina in a tone of quiet fatalism.
"When snow hide our track, he walk round and round. Bam-by he fall down,
and not get up. He die. He know that."

Garth, ready to push into the storm, reined up again. Her sureness
chilled his impatient hurry; and the oft-told tragedies of prairie
snowstorm