ring breast high, and at every effort to get out only
breaking down more of the crust and sinking deeper.

This was not the first time such a thing had happened. Why did he feel
as if it was for him the end of the world? He lay still an instant. It
would be happiness just to rest here and go to sleep. The Colonel! Oh,
well, the Colonel had taken his rifle. Funny there should be
orange-trees up here. He could smell them. He shut his eyes. Something
shone red and glowing. Why, that was the sun making an effect of
stained glass as it shone through the fat pine weather-boarding of his
little bedroom on the old place down in Florida. Suddenly a face. _Ah,
that face!_ He must be up and doing. He knew perfectly well how to get
out of this damn hole. You lie on your side and roll. Gradually you
pack the softness tight till it bears--not if you stand up on your
feet, but bears the length of your body, while you worm your way
obliquely to the top, and feel gingerly in the dimness after your
snow-shoes.

But if it happens on a pitch-dark night, and your pardner has chosen
camp out of earshot, you feel that you have looked close at the end of
the Long Trail.

On getting back to the fire, he found the Colonel annoyed at having
called "Grub!" three times--"yes, sah! three times, sah!"

And they ate in silence.

"Now I'm going to bed," said the Boy, rising stiffly.

"You just wait a minute."

"No."

Now, the Colonel himself had enunciated the law that whenever one of
them was ready to sleep the other must come too. He didn't know it, but
it is one of the iron rules of the Winter Trail. In absence of its
enforcement, the later comer brings into the warmed up sleeping-bag not
only the chill of his own body, he lets in the bitter wind, and brings
along whatever snow and ice is clinging to his boots and clothes. The
melting and warming-up is all to be done again.

But the Colonel was angry.

"Most unreasonable," he muttered--"damned unreasonable!"

Worse than the ice and the wet in the sleeping-bag, was this lying in
such close proximity to a young jackanapes who wouldn't come when you
called "Grub!" and wouldn't wait a second till you'd felt about in the
dimness for your gun. Hideous to lie so close to a man who snored, and
who'd deprived you of your 44 Marlin. Although it meant life, the Boy
grudged the mere animal heat that he gave and that he took. Full of
grudging, he dropped asleep. But the waking spirit followed him i