owever, before he knew he had made a mistake.

The storm was, if possible, more furious. The snow flew thicker; it
stung more sharply, and seemed to come from every direction.

"We'll stand right here behind the horse till it quits," he said. "It
can't keep up a lick like this."

But turning about, in an effort to face the animal away from the worst
of the blizzard, he kicked a clump of sage brush arched fairly over by
its burden of snow. Instantly a startled rabbit leaped from beneath
the shrub and bounded against the horse's legs, and then away in the
storm. In affright the horse jerked madly backward. The bridle was
broken. It held for a second, then tore away from the animal's head
and fell in a heap in the snow.

"Whoa, boy!--whoa!" said the miner, in a quiet way, but the horse, in
his terror, snorted at the brush and galloped away, to be lost from
sight on the instant.

For a moment the miner, with his bundled little burden in his arms,
started in pursuit of the bronco. But even the animal's tracks in the
snow were being already effaced by the sweep of the powdery gale. The
utter futility of searching for anything was harshly thrust upon the
miner's senses.

They were lost in that valley of snow, cold, and blizzard.

"We'll have to make a shelter the best we can," he said, "and wait
here, maybe half an hour, till the storm has quit."

He kicked the snow from a cluster of sagebrush shrubs, and behind this
flimsy barrier presently crouched, with the shivering pup, and with the
silent little foundling in his arms.

What hours that merciless blizzard raged, no annals of Nevada tell.
What struggles the gray old miner made to find his way homeward before
its wrath, what a fight it was he waged against the elements till night
came on and the worst of the storm had ceased, could never be known in
Borealis.

But early that night the teamster, Lufkins, was startled by the
neighing of a horse, and when he came to the stable, there was the
half-blinded animal on which old Jim and tiny Skeezucks had ridden away
in the morning--the empty saddle still upon his back.

CHAPTER XXI

A BED IN THE SNOW

The great stout ore-wagons stood in the snow that lay on the Borealis
street, with never a horse or a mule to keep them company. Not an
animal fit to bear a man had been left in the camp. But the twenty men
who rode far off in the white desolation out beyond were losing hope as
they searched and search