The boy bowed his head to the storm and pushed steadily forward—he must kill the loup-cervier, whose trail was growing momentarily more indistinct.
His eyes could penetrate but a few yards into the white smother, and suddenly the dark wall of the rock ledge loomed in front of him, and the trail, almost obliterated now, turned sharply and disappeared between two huge, upstanding bowlders.
CHAPTER XLI
THE BLIZZARD
At eleven o'clock in the morning Bill Carmody ordered his teams to the stables.
At twelve o'clock, when the men crowded into the grub-shack, the air was filled with fine particles of flinty snow, and the roar of the wind through the pine-tops was the mighty roar of the surf of a pounding sea.
At one o'clock the boss called "gillon," and with loud shouts and rough horse-play, the men made a rush for the bunk-house.
At two o'clock Daddy Dunnigan thrust his head through the doorway of the shop where Bill, under the blacksmith's approving eye, was completing a lesson in the proper welding of the broken link of a log chain.
With a mysterious quirk of the head he motioned the foreman to follow, and led the way to the cook-shack, where Blood River Jack waited with lowering brow.