Luck, half awakened by the movement, curled up with his knees close to his chin and went on with his dream. With the wind still mooing lonesomely around the corners of the house, he slept more soundly than he had slept for weeks, impelled, I suppose, by a subconscious easement from his greatest anxiety.
A slow tap-tap-tapping on the closed door near his head woke him just before dawn. The lightest sleeper of them all, Luck lifted his head with a start, and opened his sleep-blurred eyes upon blackness. He called out, and it was the voice of Annie-Many-Ponies that answered.
"Wagalexa Conka! You come quick. Plenty snow come. You be awful glad when you see. Soon day comes. You hurry. I make plenty breakfast, Wagalexa Conka."
As a soldier springs from sleep when calls the bugle, Luck jumped out into the icy darkness of the room. With one jerk he had the door open and stood glorying in the wild gust of snow that broke over him like a wave. In his bare feet he stood there, and felt the snow beat in his face, and said never a word, since big emotions never quite reached the surface of Luck's manner.
"Day come quick, Wagalexa Conka!" The voice of Annie-Many-Ponies urged him from without, like the voice of Opportunity calling from the storm.
"All right. You run now and have breakfast ready. We come quick." He held the door open another half minute, and he heard Annie-Many-Ponies laugh as she fought her way back to the house through the blinding blizzard. He saw a faint glow through the snow-whirl when she opened the kitchen door, and he shut out the storm with a certain vague reluctance, as though he half feared it might somehow escape into a warm, sunny morning and prove itself no more than a maddeningly vivid dream.
"Hey! Wake up!" he shouted while he groped for a match and the lamp. "Roll into your sourdoughs, you sons-uh-guns—"
"Say, Applehead," came a plaintive voice from Pink's hunk, "make Luck turn over on the other side, can't yuh? Darn a man that talks in his sleep!"
"By cripes, Luck's got to sleep in the hay loft—er I will," Big Medicine growled, making the boards of his bunk squeak with the flop of his disturbed body.
Then Luck found the lamp and struck a match, and it was seen that he was very wide awake, and that his face had the look of a man intent upon accomplishment.