The Nixon sleigh stood in the drifts, tilted end up in the attitude of a sinking boat. There were no billows to rock it, and the place where it stuck was solid enough. There was no danger of the sleigh being covered by submersion, either sudden or gradual; but the prairie winter tempest has another way of achieving burial of derelict craft and spent crews, when the travelling foot slows to a halt and the numbed brain yields to the coaxing of sleep.

There are beautiful things done between October and April by the northwest frost and sun—pattern on pane, transformation of twig, fashion of flake, aurora, twin "dogs" of the spectral sun-bow—but nothing more marvellous and swift than the building, over fallen body or stopped vehicle, of the white and wonderful sepulchre of the snow.

Out from the back of the sleigh as it stood, there tailed an indescribable drift, geometrically proportioned, beautiful beyond words. Fifteen full feet it extended, from the high sleigh-box windward, to the low drift-surface a-lee. In shape it was like the back of a saurian—one of those ruder, hardier things generationed before the earth was tempered by the Creator to the habitation of man. Within the sleigh-box another drift had formed, extending similarly from the wind-breaking frontboard along the floor to the back end. On the high seat above the central point of this latter drift, her feet buried in it, her upper body mummied in sacks and every loose thing the sleigh had held, froze and mumbled Lovina Nixon. Out alongside the bob-sleigh, a kinetic but uni-colored piece of the vast and volatile snow-swirl, John Nixon stamped up and down in the trodden hollow he had made on the leeward side of the drift, thrashed his long arms about his torso with a vigorous smack of leather mitt on shoulder-blade, and at intervals paused to lean over the side of the sleigh-box and shout encouragement to the immovable and helpless Lovina, cowled and cloaked in horse-blankets and gunny-sacks.

"How's them feet, Lovina-girl?" would come the question—raised to a whoop in order to out-crow the hurricane and penetrate the hempen coccoon. After due pause, the response would come, querulous, monotoned and faint as a voice heard through a wall:

"Ain't I said it often, that you'd—be the death of me—Jack Nixon. Why-for did you—let them team go? Just to save your tony friends—that's all. O-o-oh!"

And John Nixon—though, with his own feet aching and his finger-ends tingling, he would be tempted to retort, "How about me?"—would respond, bracingly, "Never mind, girl—there, I think I hear Jim a-comin' now. Listen!"

But the moments passed; the half-hours grew to hours; and out of the quivering white, with its perpetual hiss and whistle, its under-roar of distant wind-shaken groves, came no companionable jangle of bells. It was not until the hot bricks under Lovina's toes had lost their heat and she had commenced to cry and to labor against the creeping ache of cold by beating her feet with a dismal weak "tap-tap" against the bottom of the sleigh-box—not until stout John Nixon, aching from shoulder to waist with flailing his arms about his body, felt a cold doubt begin to rise even in the face of his confidence in hardy Jim Burns—that the shape and the sound of deliverance bulged and tinkled out through the texture of the storm-curtain, just ahead of the sleigh.

"Now, see here, you Mary," the voice was that of Lovina Nixon as, something over three-quarters of an hour later, she sat, feet in oven and tea-cup and saucer in lap, in the centre of the reassembled family group of the Nixon farmhouse; "I don't mind you helpin' yourself to Nixon's socks, when people is in need—but why don't you give 'em something to put on over the top of them, so's they won't walk the heels through," the reference was to Ware who, after an unconscious habit, developed by the usage of almost a lifetime, was pacing thoughtfully up and down the creaky floor overhead, where the spare bed was; "I got to darn them socks, not you."

"Jim," said John Nixon, as he propped a piece of pine board on the stove-pan and commenced to whittle kindlings for the morning fire, "don't forget to remind me, tomorrow, that we got to sharpen up the corks (caulks) of all them horses' shoes. I noticed yon Prince-horse kind of gruntin' as I led him into the stable, there, to-night. You ain't been loadin' them team too heavy while I been away?"

Jim Burns paused in the winding of a heavy nickel watch and glanced at his employer.

"Aw, now, Jack," he remonstrated, "don't you know no better than for to ask me a question like that? You'd think I was some green Englishman, or somethin'."

Ware, to whom this dialogue came up freely through the cracks between the warped floor-boards, smiled to himself as he sat down on the edge of the spare bed and slipped off the enormous gray socks borrowed from the wardrobe of his host.

"We do so like to be each other's critics," he murmured, with a half-sad cadence; "but I suppose it's the same, the world over.... If we could only get away from that, we children of this planet might win back what we lost at Bab-el."