on. Then she went down and found
her snowshoes. Stopping at the telephone, she called long distance and
asked them to locate Mr. Sherrill, if possible, and instruct him to
move south along the shore with whomever he had with him. She went out
then, and fastened on her snowshoes.

It had grown late. The early December dusk--the second dusk since
little boats had put off from Number 25--darkened the snow-locked land.
The wind from the west cut like a knife, even through her fur coat.
The pine trees moaned and bent, with loud whistlings of the wind among
their needles; the leafless elms and maples crashed their limbs
together; above the clamor of all other sounds, the roaring of the lake
came to her, the booming of the waves against the ice, the shatter of
floe on floe. No snow had fallen for a few hours, and the sky was even
clearing; ragged clouds scurried before the wind and, opening, showed
the moon.

Constance hurried westward and then north, following the bend of the
shore. The figure of a man--one of the shore patrols--pacing the ice
hummocks of the beach and staring out upon the lake, appeared vaguely
in the dusk when she had gone about two miles. He seemed surprised at
seeing a girl, but less surprised when he had recognized her. Mr.
Spearman, he told her, was to the north of them upon the beach
somewhere, he did not know how far; he could not leave his post to
accompany her, but he assured her that there were men stationed all
along the shore. She came, indeed, three quarters of a mile farther
on, to a second man; about an equal distance beyond, she found a third,
but passed him and went on.

Her legs ached now with the unaccustomed travel upon snowshoes; the
cold, which had been only a piercing chill at first, was stopping
feeling, almost stopping thought. When clouds covered the moon,
complete darkness came; she could go forward only slowly then or must
stop and wait; but the intervals of moonlight were growing longer and
increasing in frequency. As the sky cleared, she went forward quickly
for many minutes at a time, straining her gaze westward over the
tumbling water and the floes. It came to her with terrifying
apprehension that she must have advanced at least three miles since she
had seen the last patrol; she could not have passed any one in the
moonlight without seeing him, and in the dark intervals she had
advanced so little that she could not have missed one that way either.

She tried