The pail of milk that they carried back between them was even more comforting, for it was plain that with Hulda’s help they could not quite starve.
“We can get pretty hungry, though,” observed Hugh grimly as he saw Nicholas disposing of his share in three laps and then looking up to beg mutely for more.
There could be no thought now of going out to shoot. The snow was drifted over the window sills and banked against the door and still filled the air in white clouds driven by the roaring wind. The spring, their one water supply, was as inaccessible as though it had been ten miles away, so they melted snow in a pot over the fire and found it a most unsatisfactory process, since, as Dick said, “A bucketful of snow makes about a thimbleful of water.”
Their supply of food was quite gone by the fourth day, in spite of all their care, so there was nothing left but the milk night and morning.
“That won’t keep one very long,” Hugh remarked.
He had been obliged to gulp down his share in the stable, being much too hungry to wait until he got back to the house. Dick immediately followed his example and, when he had finished, stood eying the storm through the narrow slit of a window.
“It can’t last a great deal longer, it simply can’t,” he asserted.
Hugh, shaking down hay for Hulda, envied her the pleasure with which she ate it and answered gloomily:
“Perhaps it can’t, but I am beginning to think that it will.”
This day also wore by somehow and at last night came.