Once during the night she had partially awakened to hear the roaring wind
as it buffeted snow-clouds across the range. It had come tearing along the
divide with the black storm in its vanguard, and she had heard fearfully
the shrieks and screams of the battle as it raged up and down the gulches
and sifted into them the deep drifts.

Half-asleep as she was, she had been afraid and had cried out with terror
at this strange wakening; and he had been beside her in an instant.

"It's all right, partner. There's nothing to be afraid of," he had said
cheerfully, taking her little hand in his big warm one.

Her fears had slipped away at once. Nestling down into her rug, she had
smiled sleepily at him and fallen asleep with her cheek on her hand, her
other hand still in his.

While she had been asleep the snow-tides had filled the gulch, had risen
level with the top of the lower pane of the window. Nothing broke the
smoothness of its flow save the one track he had made in breaking a way
out. That he should have tried to find his way through such an untracked
desolation amazed her. He could never do it. No puny human atom could
fight successfully against the barriers nature had dropped so sullenly to
fence them. They were set off from the world by a quarantine of God. There
was something awful to her in the knowledge. It emphasized their
impotence. Yet, this man had set himself to fight the inevitable.

With a little shudder she turned from the window to the cheerless room.
The floor was dirty; unwashed dishes were piled upon the table. Here and
there were scattered muddy boots and overalls, just as their owner, the
prospector, had left them before he had gone to the nearest town to