“No, no,” said Bracy more firmly. “My right ankle; that is all. How horribly sudden it was!”
“Awful, sir; but don’t you talk.”
“I must now; it does me good, horrible as it all was; but, as I tell you, I was stunned mentally and bodily, to a great extent. I must have dropped a great distance into the soft snow upon a slope, and I was a long time before I could get rid of the feeling of being suffocated. I was quite buried, I suppose; but at last, in a misty way, I seemed to be breathing the cold air in great draughts as I lay on the snow, holding fast to my rifle, which somehow seemed to be the one hope I had of getting back to you.”
“You did a lot of good with it, sir.”
“Did I?”
“Course you did, sir. Digging through the snow.”
“Oh yes, I remember now,” said Bracy, with a sigh. “Yes, I remember having some idea that the snow hung above me like some enormous wave curling right over before it broke, and then becoming frozen hard. Then I remember feeling that I was like one of the rabbits in the sandhills at home, burrowing away to make a hole to get to the surface, and as fast as I got the sand down from above me I kept on kicking it out with my feet, and it slid away far below with a dull, hissing sound.”
“Yes, sir, I heard it; but that was this morning. How did you get on in the night, after you began to breathe again? You couldn’t ha’ been buried long, or you’d ha’ been quite smothered.”
“Of course,” said Bracy rather vacantly—“in the night?”
“Yes; didn’t you hear me hollering?”