partly by the
drifting snow; but, before she swept the snow away and turned him to
her, she knew that he was Alan.

She cried to him and, when he did not answer, she shook him to get him
awake; but she could not rouse him. Praying in wild whispers to
herself, she opened his jacket and felt within his clothes; he was
warm--at least he was not frozen within! No; and there seemed some
stir of his heart! She tried to lift him, to carry him; then to drag
him. But she could not; he fell from her arms into the snow again, and
she sat down, pulling him upon her lap and clasping him to her. She
must have aid, she must get him to some house, she must take him out of
the terrible cold; but dared she leave him? Might Henry return, if she
went away? She arose and looked about. Far up the shore she saw his
figure rising and falling with his flight over the rough ice. A sound
came to her too, the low, deep reverberation of the Drum beating once
more along the shore and in the woods and out upon the lake; and it
seemed to her that Henry's figure, in the stumbling steps of its
flight, was keeping time to the wild rhythm of that sound. And she
stooped to Alan and covered him with her coat, before leaving him; for
she feared no longer Henry's return.

CHAPTER XXI

THE FATE OF THE "MIWAKA"

"So this isn't your house, Judah?"

"No, Alan; this is an Indian's house, but it is not mine. It is Adam
Enos' house. He and his wife went somewhere else when you needed this."

"He helped to bring me here then?"

"No, Alan. They were alone here--she and Adam's wife. When she found
you, they brought you here--more than a mile along the beach. Two
women!"

Alan choked as he put down the little porcupine quill box which had
started this line of inquiry. Whatever questions he had asked of Judah
or of Sherrill these last few days had brought him very quickly back to
her. Moved by some intuitive certainty regarding Spearman, she had
come north; she had not thought of peril to herself; she had struggled
alone across dangerous ice in storm--a girl brought up as she had been!
She had found him--Alan--with life almost extinct upon the beach; she
and the Indian woman, Wassaquam had just said, had brought him along
the shore. How had they managed that, he wondered; they had somehow
got him to this house which, in his ignorance of exactly where he was
upon the mainland, he had thought must be Wassaquam's; she had gone to
get help