re was no sense of snug protection against the storm now. It seemed
to have invaded the store, although the west wall still held. "We'll
have to go somewhere for warmth," Ida Mary decided. Margaret's shack was
the nearest, but even so we knew the grave risk we took of perishing on
the way there. Action, however, is nearly always easier than inaction. A
time or two we stuck our heads out of the door and the cold fairly froze
our breath. Once I went outside, and when I tried to get back into the
shack the wind, sucking between the few buildings, blew me back as
though an iron hand held me.

"If we stay here," we thought, "we may be walled in by morning by the
fast-drifting snow." So we decided on Margaret's, a quarter-mile down
the draw. The chief difficulty was that the trip must be made against
the storm, and we did not know whether we could make it or not. We each
wrapped up tightly in a heavy Indian shawl, tied ourselves together with
a light blanket, picked up the scoop shovel, and started down the buried
trail.

Out through the side door and the narrow space between the buildings
which had been protected against the drifts, we made our way; then,
facing the full strength of the storm, we dug our way, shoveling as we
went, through a drift that had piled in front of the buildings, and on
through the deep level of snow.

It was getting dark now--the sudden steel-gray that envelops the plains
early on a winter night and closes in around the white stretches,
holding them in a vise. The only sign of life in the whole blanketed
world was the faint glimmer of light in Margaret's window. We knew now
how the light in the print shop must have looked many a night to
strangers lost on the prairie in a storm.

Such lightweights were we that, at every step we took, the wind blew us
back; we used all our force, pushing against that heavy wall of wind,
until we struck drifts that almost buried us. For all our clumsy tying,
the blanket held us together or we would have lost each other. We could
not speak, because if we so much as parted our lips they seemed to
freeze to our teeth, and the cold wind rasped in our throats and lungs
as though we had been running for a very long time.

Had the snow been tightly packed we could never have dug our way out of
some of the drifts. But it had been picked up and swirled around so much
by the wind that it was loose and light. It blew up off the ground,
lashed against our faces like sharp kn