He saw the little mud and log cabin at last, tucked away among some stunted trees near the shoulder of a low ridge. It looked deceivingly near, yet he rode and rode and could not reach it. White flakes were flying now, fitfully at first, then thicker and thicker until he could scarcely see. His growing misgivings gave place to greater and greater anxiety concerning his friend, while there ran through his mind again and again, the doctor’s words, “Whatever is to happen, comes quickly.”
It was past noon and had begun to seem as though he had been riding forever when he breasted the final slope at last, jumped from his horse, and thundered at the cabin door. The whine of a dog answered him within, and a faint voice, broken but still audible, told him that Michael was alive.
The cabin, so it seemed to him as he entered, was a good ten degrees colder than it was outside. Poor Michael, helpless and shivering on the bunk in the corner, looked like the shrunken ghost of the giant Irishman he had known before. Ted rekindled the fire, emptied his saddlebags, piled his extra blankets upon the bed and, with a skill bred of long practice in camp cookery, set about preparing a meal. Michael was so hoarse as to be almost unable to speak and so weak that his mind wandered in the midst of a sentence, yet all of his thoughts were on the care of his sheep.
“When I felt the sickness coming on me I tried to drive them in,” he whispered, “but they broke and scattered and I fell beside the trail—they must get in—snow coming—”
In an hour his fever rose again, he tossed and muttered with only fleeting intervals of consciousness. Ted had found food and shelter for his horse in the sheep shed, and had settled down to his task of anxious watching. The snow fell faster and faster so that darkness came on by mid-afternoon. He had tried to drive the old collie dog out to herd in the sheep, but the poor creature would not leave its master and, even when pushed outside, remained whining beside the door.
“He couldn’t do much anyway,” sighed Ted as he let him in again. “How those coyotes yelp! I wish, after all, that I had brought Pedro.”
Michael had heard the coyotes too and was striving feebly to rise from his bed.
“I must go out to them, my poor creatures,” he gasped. “Those devil beasts will have them driven over the whole country before morning.”
But he fell back, too weak to move farther, and was silent a long time. When he did speak it was almost aloud.
“With the cold and the snow, I’m thinking there will be worse things abroad this night than just the coyotes.”