et up. It was a little longer so; but the result justified it, for
there was some shelter in the coulee; and working down the bottom, they
could not miss the mark.

It was half-past four by Garth's watch when they laboriously climbed up
the other side; and set their course by compass again for Rina's camp.
It grew colder hourly; and the snowflakes became as hard and sharp as
grains of coarse powder. Charley was kept going automatically by
frequent small doses of the spirit from the flask. Garth dared not spare
any of it for himself. It soon began to grow dark; and long before Garth
could hope they had nearly covered the distance between the two coulees,
it became totally dark; and he could no longer read the face of his
compass. Fortunately the wind held steady from the north; he struggled
ahead, keeping it on his right cheek as Charley had done before him.

Garth's head became confused; he was no longer sensible of the passage
of time. Only his will kept his legs at their work. Drowsiness crept
over him; and with it a growing sense of the uselessness of struggling
further. He fought it for a while, but with subsiding energy. His knees
began to weaken under him; he sank down. With a desperate effort, he
struggled up again; and won another painful hundred yards. He was
falling again--and this time he did not care--when suddenly the ground
fell away from under his feet, he pitched forward, and he and the boy
rolled down a steep declivity together.

Garth instantly knew they had reached the second coulee; and the thought
cleared his fogged senses like the draught from his flask which he could
not spare himself. He poured the last drops between Charley's numb lips;
and turned to the right over the stony bed of the watercourse. He
remembered Charley had strayed far to the left of his true course when
guiding himself by the wind; and he had also observed in himself a
tendency to swerve to that side, when working by compass. So he was sure
they were somewhere above the poplar bluff--how far he dared not guess.

He was right. Utterly worn out by a seeming interminable struggle
through the drifts in the bottom of the coulee, at last a misty, pinkish
aura blushed in the snowy night. It was Rina's fire--warmth and shelter!
and before it a little animal was roasting on a spit. Garth's senses
slipped away in rapture at the smell it sent forth.

XXIII

THE SOLITARY PURSUER

Sometime during the course of the night the s