ich he remained outside.

It was not the first year that the Echo Creek house was not shuttered
and closed for the winter. Mrs. Leland had sometimes gone with her
husband to spend the storm swept months of the year either at one of
his other ranches or in the city, and sometimes she had stayed here.
This winter she had no particular desire to leave her comfortable home
for the makeshift of a San Francisco hotel and Wanda was eager to stay.

"You'll be cooped up within ten days like shipwrecks on a raft," Martin
Leland said when he managed to make a trip back to the ranch in
December. "We're in for a hard winter. I wouldn't be surprised if I
couldn't get in again or you get out before well on into February or
March."

He had made a flying trip between storms, hastening from El Toyon to
White Rock over the mail route, coming in from White Rock through the
still open pass through the mountains. His one object in coming had
been to try to induce his women folk to leave Echo Creek. And the same
day, seeing the threat of bad weather, he went out again, on skis and
alone.

There were busy days for all four who remained at the ranch house in
making preparations for idle, comfortable days to follow. Jim brought
vast quantities of wood from the basement, piling it high in the corner
of the living room where it would be convenient for feeding the deep
throated fireplace whose rocks would stay warm all night, hot all day,
for many weeks. From the yard he brought more wood, piling it in the
basement until there were only narrow passageways between the slabs and
logs and the finer split stove wood. Julia superintended the placing
of her kitchen supplies, secreted those little delicacies which she
would require at Christmas time, arranged her canned goods and
perpetually fussed and rearranged in her storeroom. Meanwhile Mrs.
Leland and Wanda were everywhere at once, overseeing the moving of
beds, the shifting of furniture, the making cosy of the home against
the siege. And then, howling and shrieking, with deep voice shouting
across the pine forests, the winter came in earnest.

Martin Leland had read the signs aright; it was to be a hard winter.
There came a wind storm that lasted without cessation for three days;
the branches of the cedars about the house tossed like long arms
grappling with an unseen foe; here and there a dead limb was wrenched
from a tree trunk and hurled far out to be buried in the snow which
bega