Breckenridge nodded. “It dropped like that before the last blizzard we had.”
Grant turned and looked about him, and Breckenridge shivered as he followed his gaze. They had driven out from behind the rise now and a bitter wind met them in the face. There was not very much of it as yet, but all feeling seemed to die out of the lad’s cheeks under it, and it brought a little doleful moaning out of the darkness. Behind them stars shone frostily in the soft indigo, but elsewhere a deepening obscurity was creeping up across the prairie, and sky and snow were blurred and merged one into the other.
“There’s one meaning to that,” said Grant. “We’ll have snow in an hour or two, and when it comes it’s going to be difficult to see anything. In the meanwhile, we’ll drive round by Busby’s and get our supper while the cow-boys cool. The man who hangs around a couple of hours doing nothing in a frost of this kind is not to be relied upon when he’s wanted in a hurry.”
He flicked the horses, and in half an hour the pair were sitting in a lonely log-house beside a glowing stove while its owner prepared a meal. Two other men with bronzed faces sat close by, and Breckenridge fancied he had never seen his comrade so cheerful. His cares seemed to have fallen from him, his laugh had a pleasant ring, and there was something in his eyes which had not been there for many weary months. Breckenridge wondered whether it could be due to anything Miss Torrance had said to him, but kept his thoughts to himself, for that was a subject upon which one could not ask questions.
In the meanwhile, Clavering and the Sheriff found the time pass much less pleasantly—on the bluff. The wind that whistled through it grew colder as one by one the stars faded out, and there was a mournful wailing amidst the trees. Now and then, a shower of twigs came rattling down from branches dried to brittleness by the frost, and the Sheriff brushed them off disgustedly, as, huddling lower in the sleigh from which the horses had been taken out, he packed the robes round him. He had lived softly, and it would have suited him considerably better to have spent that bitter evening in the warmth and security of Clavering’s ranch.
“No sign of him yet?” he said, when Christopher Allonby and Clavering came up together. “Larry will stay at home to-night. He has considerably more sense than we seem to have.”
“I have seen nothing,” said Allonby, who, in the hope of restoring his circulation, had walked up the trail. “Still, the night is getting thicker, and nobody could make a sleigh out until it drove right up to him.”
“If Larry did come, you could hear him,” said the Sheriff.
Allonby lifted his hand, and, as if to supply the answer, with a great thrashing of frost-nipped twigs the birches roared about them. The blast that lashed them also hurled the icy dust of snow into the Sheriff’s face.
“I don’t know,” said the lad. “Nobody could hear very much through that.”