glittered keenly above the sleeping camp. Mr. Oakhurst, whose
professional habits had enabled him to live on the smallest possible
amount of sleep, in dividing the watch with Tom Simson somehow managed
to take upon himself the greater part of that duty. He excused himself
to the Innocent by saying that he had "often been a week without
sleep." "Doing what?" asked Tom. "Poker!" replied Oakhurst
sententiously. "When a man gets a streak of luck,--nigger-luck,--he
don't get tired. The luck gives in first. Luck," continued the gambler
reflectively, "is a mighty queer thing. All you know about it for
certain is that it's bound to change. And it's finding out when it's
going to change that makes you. We've had a streak of bad luck since
we left Poker Flat,--you come along, and slap you get into it, too. If
you can hold your cards right along you're all right. For," added the
gambler, with cheerful irrelevance--

"'I'm proud to live in the service of the Lord, And I'm bound to die
in His army.'"

The third day came, and the sun, looking through the white-curtained
valley, saw the outcasts divide their slowly decreasing store of
provisions for the morning meal. It was one of the peculiarities of
that mountain climate that its rays diffused a kindly warmth over the
wintry landscape, as if in regretful commiseration of the past. But it
revealed drift on drift of snow piled high around the hut,--a
hopeless, uncharted, trackless sea of white lying below the rocky
shores to which the castaways still clung. Through the marvelously
clear air the smoke of the pastoral village of Poker Flat rose miles
away. Mother Shipton saw it, and from a remote pinnacle of her rocky
fastness hurled in that direction a final malediction. It was her last
vituperative attempt, and perhaps for that reason was invested with a