oy and shifted his body a little to
put shavings on the touchwood. An ill wind struck the feeble
blaze, which was not yet strong enough to stand fanning into
greater life, and it went out, leaving a little black ash to mark
where the touchwood had been.

Dick's nerves were so much overwrought that he cried aloud again,
and now it was a cry of despair, not of joy. He looked at the
little black ash as if his last chance were gone, but his despair
did not last long. He seized the dry stick again and scraped off
another little pile of touchwood. Once more the sunglass and
once more the dreadful waiting, now longer than five minutes and
nearer ten, while Dick waited in terrible fear, lest the sun
itself should fail him, and go behind impenetrable clouds.

But the second spark came and after it, as before, followed the
little flame. No turning aside now to allow a cruel chance to an
ill wind. Instead, he bent down his body more closely than ever
to protect the vital blaze, and, reaching out one cautious arm,
fed it first with the smallest of the splinters, and then with
the larger in an ascending scale.

Up leaped the flames, red and strong. Dick's body could not
wholly protect them now, but they fought for themselves. When
the wind shrieked and whipped against them, they waved back
defiance, and the more the wind whipped them, the higher and
stronger they grew.

The victory was with the flames, and Dick fed them with wood,
almost with his body and soul, and all the time as the wind bent
them over they crackled and ate deeper and deeper into the wood.
He could put on damp wood now. The flames merely leaped out,
licked up the melted snow with a hiss and a sputter, and
developed the stick in a mass of glowing red.

Dick fed his fire a full half hour, hunting continually in the
snow under the trees for brushwood and finding much of it, enough
to start a second fire at the far end of the sheltered place,
with more left in reserve. He spent another half hour heaping up
the snow as a bulwark about his den, and then sat down between
the two fires to dry and warm, almost to roast himself.

It was the first time that Dick understood how much pleasure
could be drawn from a fire alone. What beautiful red and yellow
flames! What magnificent glowing coals! What a glorious thing
to be there, while the wind above was howling over the snowy and
forlorn plain! His clothes dried rapidly. He no longer
shivered. The gra