s recurred to him.

"Die in the snow!" he repeated dully, hanging in agonizing indecision
between the two images; Natalie ahead, and the solitary boy plodding
behind. On the one hand he thought: "The storm has held them up,
somewhere just ahead! It is my only chance of overtaking them!" and then
he turned his horse's head north. But the other thought would not down.
"The kid knew it meant death to walk; and he chose it!" Garth finally
led the way back over the coulee.

Rina had no difficulty making herself comfortable among the young poplar
trees. She improvised a shelter out of a blanket stretched over two
inclined saplings; and in front of it she built a fire. Garth meanwhile
changed to the fresher horse, and started back over their own dimming
trail.

"You never find him now," Rina said hopelessly, as he left her.

Garth merely set his jaw.

His watch told him it was past eleven. He calculated they had covered
five miles between the two coulees, and that it would be about
twenty-five miles all told back to their own camping-place. Supposing
the boy to have averaged three miles an hour, he would now be some
twelve miles away, and if he kept walking, Garth, at his present pace,
should come upon him in an hour and a half's riding.

The marks of their previous passage were soon completely obliterated;
and thereafter Garth rode compass in hand. With the wind behind, his
horse showed a better stomach for travelling; and he made the first
coulee in something under an hour. Here a little search revealed the
half-burned logs of Grylls's fire under the snow; and this put him
directly in the path again. He stood up the logs, to make a better mark
against his return.

He began to keep a sharp lookout for the boy, frequently shouting his
name. His voice, muffled by the thickly falling flakes, had an odd,
deadened ring in his own ears; and he doubted if he could be heard very
far. When he considered the vast width of the prairie, and the extreme
improbability of two figures, shaping opposite courses, meeting
point-blank in the middle of it, he was ready to despair of finding the
boy. It maddened him to think how close they might pass, without either
being aware.

Later, he adopted another expedient. Every fifteen minutes he turned his
horse at right angles to his course, and galloping far to the right and
left searched the snow for human tracks; then, picking up his trail
where he left it, he would push a little farther