“I’ll try to walk right in her steps,” Peggy decided, “and then I’ll get just the right method—but, oh, my goodness, what a tall girl she must be! These footprints are so far apart I can’t possibly take such long steps. She must be a wonderful snow-shoeist—maybe she won’t want to walk with me even when I do catch up to her, since she’s apparently so much more expert.”
With ludicrous attempts to fit her steps into those of Friday, she pursued her way until at last she had climbed the hill where the tracks had at first been lost, and there they were continuing, forever, it seemed.
Without hesitation Peggy followed. Lost to all but the exhilaration of a brand new exercise, and the stimulus of the cold wind that yet never chilled her glowing face, she kept on until Andrews was a thing of the past, and she could not have found her way back except for the tracks she was making now. And then all of a sudden she noticed something was different. The footprints no longer gleamed in her eyes, and the beautiful dazzle of the snow was blotted out. In an instant more a whirling mass of moist snow flakes was falling about her, obscuring everything but their own fantastic, falling selves.
“Well,” decided she promptly, “I guess I’ll be getting back.”
But when she turned back the wind came rushing in her face and took her breath and nearly blew her down.
“Well,” she changed her mind. “I guess I won’t. Friday, where are you—you must be somewhere out in this sudden storm, too. And if I could only find you I wouldn’t feel as lost and shaky as I do now. Misery loves company—not that I’m miserable—but something”—she choked back a sob, “something seems to be gloomy in my heart.”
Since she could not go back, and since the thought of coming up with Friday was a very comforting one, she plodded on, winking the snow out of her eyes and shaking it off of her cap and out of her hair.
She could scarcely see the tracks ahead of her now, as the new snow was fast obliterating them, and her own steps were made with increasing difficulty. Anyone who has ever tried to snow-shoe over soft, new-fallen snow knows the hardship of Peggy’s predicament.
All at once she discovered that she could not lift her left foot at all. Try as she would, it would not rise and swing forward to its next step.—Paralyzed! The horror of her situation, there all alone in the cold and snow, out of sight of everybody, slowly being paralyzed with no one to know or care, filled her with momentary hopelessness.
“Oh, Friday,” she thought, “I don’t see how you could have snow-shoed so far ahead of me as not to have been caught up with by now. Dear, dear, if I could only find that girl, maybe she would try to drag me to some farm house, or something. If she’s one of the Andrews girls she wouldn’t want me to freeze to death out here all by myself. Maybe if I called very loud she’d hear and come back—”