In the glare of the winter sun, ice crystals floated instead of the mites which used to dance in the summer sunshine, and on those gray blots, which had been lakes where ducks called and shook their dripping wings, stood now the mud-huts of the musk-rats, and beside them at the edge of the ice stood their owners, rigid, silent, and watchful, as everything seemed to be in this silent winter-world. As far as the eye could see, in heaven or on the earth, there was nothing which lived or moved except those musk-rats, and you could not tell that they lived until the ice crunched under your feet. Then they vanished. There was no sound. You did not see them go, only when you looked again the little rigid figures were there no longer. Even old Rampike almost shivered as the biting wind caught him when he topped the ridge, and he drew his coat together and buttoned it as he turned to Ned.
"It's real winter up here, sonny, and I reckon it will be mighty lonesome for that heathen of yours by the crik, unless he and Cruickshank hev jined and gone into partnership. I'm beginning to think as he has got starved after all."
Ned made no reply. It was horribly lonesome; but if Phon and Cruickshank had met, Ned didn't think that the Chinaman would care whether the sun warmed or the winter wind froze him, whether he lay alone or in the midst of his fellow-men. Ned had a hideously vivid recollection of another snow scene, and of a certain little black bullet hole in the nape of a man's neck.
Well, after all, he reflected, death by gunshot might be preferable to a slow death by starvation and cold, and day by day it became more abundantly clear that neither Rampike nor Ned would find their way to Phon that winter.
The snow had changed the whole surface of the country so thoroughly that even had Ned passed through every inch of it with his eyes open he would never have recognized it again. There were hollows where before there had been hills, hills where there had been hollows. The drifting snow had made a false surface to the land and covered every landmark; and, moreover, the two searchers began to feel that it would not do to remain in the uplands any longer, unless they too would be cut off and buried away from their fellow-men by the tons upon tons of soft feathery stuff which the skies threatened to pour down upon them every day.
"It's no good talking, Ned, we're beat and we've got to give in. If your heathen hasn't skipped out some other way he's a corpse, that's just what he is, and we've no call to risk our skins collecting corpses," said Rampike as he sat in the dug-out, to which the two had returned after nearly three weeks' search for Phon. "The Almighty seems to have a down on you, my lad, someways, and if one may say so without harm, He seems to be standin' in with Cruickshank, but you bet He'll straighten it out by and by. Up to now Cruickshank has won every trick, and you're jest about broke; but no matter, we'll stay right with him all the while, and we'll get four kings or a straight flush and bust the beggar sky-high at the finish: see if we don't. What we've got to do now is jest to hole up like the bars. Winter's coming right away."
It was a long speech for Rampike, but the occasion was a serious one, and the old man felt that it would require all the influence which he could bring to bear to make Ned Corbett accept his defeat, and take some thought for his own safety.
"What makes you think that winter is so close?" Ned asked.
"Wal, there's a many reasons. The weather has been hardenin' up slowly all the while, and yesterday I saw the tracks of a little bunch of ewes along the top of that bench above us. The big-horns are comin' down, and when they come down you may look out for real winter. You bet."
After this there was silence for a time. Steve and Ned were thinking of the long account unsettled between themselves and Cruickshank, and a little too of the weary months during which they must lie dormant, as Rampike said, "like bears in a hole."