She pulled the covering from True’s back and mounted.
They started just as a veil of blinding snow fell full in their faces—and it fell so fast the ground was soon white.
The vicious wind, like an unchained demon, caught True’s thick black mane and blew it upwards, giving him a spasm of cold on his neck. He shivered. A moan swept through the hemlock boughs, they bent before the wind. Margery moistened the end of her finger and held it up, a thin skin of ice formed on its front.
Beaten by the wind and blinded by the snow his old storm-terror came over the horse, he wheeled and let the biting blast beat against his haunches—head down and heavy black tail against the on coming snow and numbing cold.
Once or twice he sniffed, as if in consultation with his rider, but as she offered no advice, he sprang to the shelter of a clump of firs and the harsh wind whistled fiercely on.
Margery slid from the saddle and with stiff but deft hands she caught True’s foot and threw him, Indian-fashion, to the ground. Then she broke huge branches of hemlock and piled them up as a brake against the snow, crouching close to the willing body of the now motionless horse. The wind, making a grating sound, pressed hard against their brake but it did not give, and trembling with cold the two waited for the storm to pass. The snow fell and fell; like knives the icy splinters lashed their eyelids and swirled on, tossing wave upon wave of snow on their protection of boughs and mounding it almost over them.
A large branch, heavy with the weight of ice and sleet, snapped from a tree near by and crashed to the ground, but they did not stir.
Angry mutterings came to them through the evergreen branches and shrieked off over the mountains like wind-tossed spirits. Through the long hours they made hardly a movement.
At last the darkness was over and from out the place where it went the sun came, flashing long rays of gold on trees draped with icicles and a world carpeted with snow, sparkling and gleaming, dazzling their eyes with its glitter.
A strange calm had fallen on the wind-swept scene when they rose and shook themselves, stiff with cold, to set off homeward. Over all the glistening landscape hung a deep-blue sky, calm, serene.