moment a voice she
remembered broke on her ears through the clamour of the wind.

"Thank God, Helen! I am in time."

And she looked up incredulously to find Gerald Ainley looking down at
her.

CHAPTER XXI

CHIGMOK'S STORY

When Stane set his face to the storm he knew there was a difficult task
before him, and he found it even more difficult than he had
anticipated. The wind, bitingly cold, drove the snow before it in an
almost solid wall. The wood sheltered him somewhat; but fearful of
losing himself, and so missing what he was seeking, he dared not turn
far into it, and was forced to follow the edge of it, that he might not
wander from the lake. Time after time he was compelled to halt in the
lee of the deadfalls, or shelter behind a tree with his back to the
storm, whilst he recovered breath. He could see scarcely a yard before
him, and more than once he was driven to deviate from the straight
course, and leave the trees in order to assure himself that he had not
wandered from the lake side.

The bitter cold numbed his brain; the driving snow was utterly
confusing, and before he reached his objective he had only one thing
clear in his mind. Blistering though it was, he must keep his face to
the wind, then he could not go wrong, for the storm, sweeping down the
lake, came in a direct line from the bluff in the shadow of which the
tragedy which he had witnessed, had happened. As he progressed, slowly,
utter exhaustion seemed to overtake him. Bending his head to the blast
he swayed like a drunken man. More than once as he stumbled over fallen
trees the impulse to sit and rest almost overcame him; but knowing the
danger of such a course he forced himself to refrain. Once as he halted
in the shelter of a giant fir, his back resting against the trunk, he
was conscious of a deadly, delicious languor creeping through his
frame, and knowing it for the beginning of the dreaded snow-sleep which
overtakes men in such circumstances, he lurched forward again, though
he had not recovered breath.

He came to a sudden descent in the trail that he was following. It was
made by a small stream that in spring flooded down to the lake but
which now was frozen solid. In the blinding snow-wrack he never even
saw it, and stepping on air, he hurtled down the bank, and rolled in a
confused heap in the deep snow at the bottom. For a full minute he lay
there, out of the wind and biting snow-hail, feeling like a man who has
stumb