it with snow. Some one ahead of us, with a lantern, guided our
course for a mile or so through the dense obscurity, and then he
turned off on another road. At first I hailed one and another in the
black cavern of the rockaway behind me, and their muffled voices
would answer, "All right." But one after another they ceased to
answer me until all were fast asleep except my wife. She insisted
that she was only very drowsy, but I knew that she was also very,
very tired. Indeed, I felt myself, in a way that frightened me, the
strange desire to sleep that overcomes those long exposed to cold
and wind.

I must have been nodding and swaying around rather loosely, when I
felt myself going heels over head into the snow. As I picked myself
up I heard my wife and children screaming, and John Jones shouting
to his horses, "Git up," while at the same time he lashed them with
his whip. My face was so plastered with snow that I could see only a
dark object which was evidently being dragged violently out of a
ditch, for when the level road was reached, Mr. Jones shouted,
"Whoa!"

"Robert, are you hurt?" cried my wife.

"No, are you?"

"Not a bit, but I'm frightened to death."

Then John Jones gave a hearty guffaw and said:

"I bet you our old shanghai rooster that you don't die."