He knocked once more, more loudly than before, and bent his head to listen. No answer came.
After a minute's waiting he walked around to the front of the house. In the broad daylight which had spread itself now over the white landscape, he noticed something he had missed before. There had been no path cut through from the house to the road. The frozen drifts lay packed as they had fallen upon the doorsill. There was no mark of footsteps save his own. The window-panes were opaque with frost.
Mose tried the latch. It yielded readily, and he entered. The light inside was so dim, after the morning glow on the snow without, that it was hard at first to make out the room, familiar as it was to him. Apparently there was no one there.
A curious change of some sort there had been, though. Mose shut the door and walked across to the stove, instinctively holding his hands over it. So dull a semblance of warmth radiated up from the griddles that he put a finger on the metal. It was only blood-warm.
Some one had left a fire here an hour ago. Where was his father? What had happened?
Then Mose saw what it was that had at the outset vaguely puzzled him. The straw tick had been brought from the bed in the other room and spread there on the floor behind the stove. It was covered with bedding and old clothes, and under these—
In a flash Mose was on his knees beside the improvised bed, and had pushed away the coverings at the top. There was disclosed before him the head of a man asleep—a head which he scarcely recognized at first sight, so profuse and dishevelled were its masses of white hair and beard, so pinched to ghastliness the waxen features.
"He is dead!" Mose heard himself say aloud, in a voice that sounded not at all his own.
But no; there was warmth, and a feeble flicker of pulse at the shrunken wrist which he instinctively fumbled for under the bedclothes.
"Father! Father!" Mose called, bending till his lips touched the white hair. "Wake up! I've come back! it's me—Mose!"