nd a voice
like a fog-horn.

"Didn't send for ye? Wall, I'll be gol-durned! And yer had to fut it?
Well, don' that beat all. And yer ain't the fust one they've left down
here to get up the best way they could. Last winter--Jan'ry, warn't it,
Bill?" Bill nodded--"there come a woman from New York and they dumped
her out jes' same as you. I happened to come along in time, as luck
would have it--I was haulin' a load of timber on my bob-sled--and there
warn't nothin' else, so I took her up to the village. She got in late,
of course, but they was a-waitin' for her. I really wasn't goin' to hear
you speak to-night--we git so much of that sort of thing since the old
man who left the money to pay you fellers for talkin' died--been goin'
on ten years now--but I'll take yer 'long with me, and glad to. But yer
oughter have somethin' warmer'n what yer got on. Wind's kinder nippy
down here, but it ain't nothin' to the way it bites up on the ridge."

This same thought had passed through my own mind. The unusual exertion
had started every pore in my body; the red-hot stove had put on the
finishing touches and I was in a Russian bath. To face that wind meant
all sorts of calamities.

The Madonna-like wife with the cherub in her arms rose to her feet.

"Would you mind wearing my fur tippet?" she said in her soft voice;
"'tain't much, but it 'ud keep out the cold from yer neck and maybe this
shawl'd help some, if I tied it round your shoulders. Father got his
death ridin' to the village when he was overhet."

She put them on with her own hands, bless her kind heart! her husband
holding the baby; then she followed me out into the cold and helped draw
the horse-blanket over my knees; the man in the coon-skin cap lugging
the bags and the umbrella.

I looked at my watch. After eight o'clock, and two miles to drive!

"Oh, I'll git yer there," came a voice from inside the fur overcoat.
"Darter wanted to go, but I said 'twarn't no night to go nowhars. Got to
see a man who owes me some money, or I'd stay home myself. Git up, Joe."

It was marvellous, the intelligence of this man. More than marvellous
when my again blinded eyes--the red flannel in the lamp helped--began to
take in the landscape. Fences were evidently of no use to him; clumps of
trees didn't count. If he had a compass anywhere about his clothes,
he never once consulted it. Drove right on--across trackless Siberian
steppes; by the side of endless glaciers, and through primev