"It isn't so very cold if one is not exposed to the wind and snow," she replied, "and Mr. Jones says we needn't be exposed. I don't believe we'd run as much risk as in going to a little hotel, the best rooms of which are already taken. Since we can do it, it will be so much nicer to go to a place that we feel is our own!"
"I must say that your wishes accord with mine."
"Oh, I knew that," she replied, laughing. "Mr. Jones," she added, sociably, "this man has a way of telling you what he wishes by his looks before asking your opinion."
"I found that out the day he came up to see the place," chuckled my neighbor, "and I was half a mind to stick him for another hundred for being so honest. He don't know how to make a bargain any more than one of the children there. Well, I'll go to the shed and get the hosses, and we'll make a pull for home. I don't believe you'll be sorry when you get there."
Mr. Jones came around to the very door with the rockaway, and we tucked my wife and children under the buffalo robes and blankets till they could hardly breathe. Then we started out into the white, spectral world, for the wind had coated everything with the soft, wet snow. On we went at a slow walk, for the snow and mud were both deep, and the wheeling was very heavy. Even John Jones's loquacity was checked, for every time he opened his mouth the wind half filled it with snow. Some one ahead of us, with a lantern, guided our course for a mile or so through the dense obscurity, and then he turned off on another road. At first I hailed one and another in the black cavern of the rockaway behind me, and their muffled voices would answer, "All right." But one after another they ceased to answer me until all were fast asleep except my wife. She insisted that she was only very drowsy, but I knew that she was also very, very tired. Indeed, I felt myself, in a way that frightened me, the strange desire to sleep that overcomes those long exposed to cold and wind.
I must have been nodding and swaying around rather loosely, when I felt myself going heels over head into the snow. As I picked myself up I heard my wife and children screaming, and John Jones shouting to his horses, "Git up," while at the same time he lashed them with his whip. My face was so plastered with snow that I could see only a dark object which was evidently being dragged violently out of a ditch, for when the level road was reached, Mr. Jones shouted, "Whoa!"
"Robert, are you hurt?" cried my wife.
"No, are you?"
"Not a bit, but I'm frightened to death."
Then John Jones gave a hearty guffaw and said: