The big Scotchman ordered his team of Siberian wolf-hounds made ready for the trail. As he donned his heavy furs, Colby Macdonald smiled with deep satisfaction. He had Elliot on the run at last.

Just as he closed the door of his room, Macdonald heard the telephone bell ring. He hesitated, then shrugged his shoulders and strode out into the storm. If he had answered the call he would have learned from Diane, who was at the other end of the line, that the stage upon which Sheba had started for Katma had not reached the roadhouse at Smith's Crossing.

Five minutes later the winners of the great Alaska Sweepstakes were flying down the street in the teeth of the storm. Armed with a rifle and a revolver, their owner was mushing into the hills to bring back the men who had robbed his bank and killed the cashier. He traveled alone because he could go faster without a companion. It never occurred to him that he was not a match for any two men he might face.

CHAPTER XXV

IN THE BLIZZARD

"Swift.w.a.ter" Pete, the driver of the stage between Kusiak and Katma, did not like the look of the sky as his ponies breasted the long uphill climb that ended at the pa.s.s. It was his habit to grumble. He had been complaining ever since they had started. But as he studied the heavy billows of cloud banked above the peaks and in the saddle between, there was real anxiety in his red, apoplectic face.

"Gittin' her back up for a blizzard, looks like. Doggone it, if that wouldn't jest be my luck," he murmured fretfully.

Sheba hoped there would be one, not, of course, a really, truly blizzard such as Macdonald had told her about, but the tail of a make-believe one, enough to send her glowing with exhilaration into the roadhouse with the happy sense of an adventure achieved. The girl had got out to relieve the horses, and as her young, lissom body took the hill scattering flakes of snow were already flying.

To-day she was buoyed up by a sense of freedom. For a time, at least, she was escaping Macdonald's driving energy, the appeal of Gordon Elliot's warm friendliness, and the unvoiced urging of Diane. Good old Peter and the kiddies were the only ones that let her alone.

She looked back at the horses laboring up the hill. Swift.w.a.ter had got down and was urging them forward, his long whip crackling about the ears of the leaders. He waddled as he walked. His fat legs were too short for the round barrel body. A big roll of fat bulged out over the collar of his shirt. Whenever he was excited--and he always was on the least excuse--he puffed and snorted and grew alarmingly purple.

"Fat chance," he exploded as soon as he got within hearing. "Snow in those clouds--tons of it. H'm! And wind. Wow! We're in for an honest-to-G.o.d blizzard, sure as you're a foot high."

Swift.w.a.ter was worried. He would have liked to turn and run for it. But the last roadhouse was twenty-seven miles back. If the blizzard came howling down the slope they would have a sweet time of it reaching safety. Smith's Crossing was on the other side of the divide, only nine miles away. They would have to worry through somehow. Probably those angry clouds were half a bluff.

The temperature was dropping rapidly. Already snow fell fast in big thick flakes. To make it worse, the wind was beginning to rise. It came in shrill gusts momentarily increasing in force.

The stage-driver knew the signs of old and cursed the luck that had led him to bring the stage. It was to have been the last trip with horses until spring. His dogs were waiting for him at Katma for the return journey. He did not blame himself, for there was no reason to expect such a storm so early in the season. None the less, it was too bad that his lead dog had been ailing when he left the gold camp eight days before.

Miss O'Neill knew that Swift.w.a.ter Pete was anxious, and though she was not yet afraid, the girl understood the reason for it. The road ran through the heart of a vast snow-field, the surface of which was being swept by a screaming wind. The air was full of sifted white dust, and the road furrow was rapidly filling. Soon it would be obliterated.

Already the horses were panting and struggling as they ploughed forward.

Sheba tramped behind the stage-driver and in her tracks walked Mrs.

Olson, the other pa.s.senger.

Through the m.u.f.fled scream of the storm Swift.w.a.ter shouted back to Sheba. "You wanta keep close to me."

She nodded her head. His order needed no explanation. The world was narrowing to a lane whose walls she could almost touch with her fingers.

A pall of white wrapped them. Upon them beat a wind of stinging sleet.

Nothing could be seen but the blurred outlines of the stage and the driver's figure.

The bitter cold searched through Sheba's furs to her soft flesh and the blast of powdered ice beat upon her face. The snow was getting deeper as the road filled. Once or twice she stumbled and fell. Her strength ebbed, and the hinges of her knees gave unexpectedly beneath her. How long was it, she asked herself, that Macdonald had said men could live in a blizzard?

Staggering blindly forward, Sheba b.u.mped into the driver. He had drawn up to give the horses a moment's rest before sending them plunging at the snow again.

"No chance," he called into the young woman's ear. "Never make Smith's in the world. Goin' try for miner's cabin up gulch little way."

The team stuck in the drifts, fought through, and was blocked again ten yards beyond. A dozen times the horses gave up, answered the sting of the whip by diving head first at the white banks, and were stopped by fresh snow-combs.

Pete gave up the fight. He began unhitching the horses, while Sheba and Mrs. Olson, clinging to each other's hands, stumbled forward to join him. The words he shouted across the back of a horse were almost lost in the roar of the shrieking wind.

"... heluvatime ... ride ... gulch," Sheba made out.

He flung Mrs. Olson astride one of the wheelers and helped Sheba to the back of the right leader. Swift.w.a.ter clambered upon its mate himself.

The girl paid no attention to where they were going. The urge of life was so faint within her that she did not greatly care whether she lived or died. Her face was blue from the cold; her vitality was sapped. She seemed to herself to have turned to ice below the hips. Outside the misery of the moment her whole attention was concentrated on sticking to the back of the horse. Numb though her fingers were, she must keep them fastened tightly in the frozen mane of the animal. She recited her lesson to herself like a child. She must stick on--she must--she must.

Whether she lost consciousness or not Sheba never knew. The next she realized was that Swift.w.a.ter Pete was pulling her from the horse. He dragged her into a cabin where Mrs. Olson lay crouched on the floor.

"Got to stable the horses," he explained, and left them.

After a time he came back and lit a fire in the sheet-iron stove. As the circulation that meant life flooded back into her chilled veins Sheba endured a half-hour of excruciating pain. She had to clench her teeth to keep back the groans that came from her throat, to walk the floor and nurse her tortured hands with fingers in like plight.

The cabin was empty of furniture except for a home-made table, rough stools, and the frame of a bed. The last occupant had left a little firewood beside the stove, enough to last perhaps for twenty-four hours.

Sheba did not need to be told that if the blizzard lasted long enough, they would starve to death. In the handbag left in the stage were a box of candy and an Irish plum pudding. She had brought the latter from the old country with her and was taking it and the chocolates to the Husted children. But just now the stage was as far from them as Drogheda.

Like many rough frontiersmen, Swift.w.a.ter Pete was a diamond in the raw. He had the kindly, gentle instincts that go to the making of a good man. So far as could be he made a hopeless and impossible situation comfortable. His judgment told him that they were caught in a trap from which there was no escape, but for the sake of the women he put a cheerful face on things.

"Lucky we found this cabin," he growled amiably. "By this time we'd 'a'

been up Salt Creek if we hadn't. Seeing as our luck has stood up so far, I reckon we'll be all right. Mighty kind of Mr. Last Tenant to leave us this firewood. Comes to a showdown we've got one table, four stools, and a bed that will make first-cla.s.s fuel. We ain't so worse off."

"If we only had some food," Mrs. Olson suggested.

"Food!" Pete looked at her in a.s.sumed surprise. "Huh! What about all that live stock I got in the stable? I've heard tell, ma'am, that broncho tenderloin is a favorite dish with them there French chiefs that do the cooking. They kinder trim it up so's it's 'most as good as frawgs' legs."

Sheba had never before slept on bare boards with a sealskin coat for a sleeping-bag. But she was very tired and dropped off almost instantly.

Twice she woke during the night, disturbed by the stiffness and the pain of her body. It seemed to her that the hard, whipsawed planks were pushing through the soft flesh to the bones. She was cold, too, and crept closer to the stout Swedish woman lying beside her. Presently she fell asleep again to the sound of the blizzard howling outside. When she wakened for the third time it was morning.

In the afternoon the blizzard died away. As far as she could see, Sheba looked out upon a waste of snow. Her eyes turned from the desolation without to the bare and cheerless room in which they had found shelter.

In spite of herself a little shiver ran down the spine of the girl. Had she come into this Arctic solitude to find her tomb?

Resolutely she brushed the gloomy thought from her mind and began to chat with Mrs. Olson. In a corner of the cabin Sheba had found a torn and disreputable copy of "Vanity Fair." The covers and the first forty pages were gone. A splash of what appeared to be tobacco juice defiled the last sheet. But the fortunes of Becky and Amelia had served to make her forget during the morning that she was hungry and likely to be much hungrier before another day had pa.s.sed.

As soon as the storm had moderated enough to let him go out with safety, Swift.w.a.ter Pete had taken one of the horses for an attempt at trail-breaking.

"Me, I'm after that plum pudding. I gotta get a feed of oats from the stage for my bronchs too. The scenery here is sure fine, but it ain't what you would call nourishing. Huh! Watch our smoke when me and old Baldface git to bucking them drifts."

He had been gone two hours and the early dusk was already descending over the white waste when Sheba ventured out to see what had become of the stage-driver. But the cold was so bitter that she soon gave up the attempt to fight her way through the drifts and turned back to the cabin.

Sometime later Swift.w.a.ter Pete came stumbling into their temporary home.

He was f.a.gged to exhaustion but triumphant. Upon the table he dropped from the crook of his numbed arm two packages.

"The makings for a Christmas dinner," he said with a grin.

After he had taken off his mukluks and his frozen socks they wrapped him in their furs while he toasted before the stove. Mrs. Olson thawed out the pudding and the chocolates in the oven and made a kind of mush out of some oats Pete had saved from the horse feed. They ate their one-sided meal in high spirits. The freeze had saved their lives. If it held clear till to-morrow they could reach Smith's Crossing on the crust of the snow.

Swift.w.a.ter broke up the chairs for fuel and demolished the legs of the table, after which he lay down before the stove and fell at once into a sodden sleep.