That Peter was near the cabin, that he had turned back and was making a desperate fight to reach its shelter was as firmly a part of Donald's mind as the conviction that all the forces of the darkness and evil were trying to keep him away from his boy.
His head was bare and his woolen shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, but he did not sense the terrible cold that came with the blizzard. Among the trees his feet found instinctively the beginning of the trail that was blazed through the forest and he reached out his naked hands and plunged knee-deep through windrows of snow that lay in his way. The thickets whipped and beat at him and branches, ambushed in darkness, reached out from twisting trees to strike him, but he did not feel sting or pain.
At last he was sure he heard an answer to his calling but the wind came and roared in his ears and the snow beat so fiercely in his face that he could not locate the quarter from which it came. Then he tricked the wind. He stumbled in the snow behind a tree and lay there until a brief lull followed in the wake of it, when he called again as loudly as he could. But he had the direction of it now and a hundred paces brought him to the edge of a rocky ravine which ran near the trail. Down this he clambered and in the pit-like darkness at the bottom found what he was seeking. Beside a figure rumpled and twisted in the snow he fell upon his knees, moaning Peter's name.
Half an hour later Donald came back to the light in the clearing, staggering under the weight of his burden. He opened the door and together the two crashed in upon the floor. On his hands and knees Donald turned and shut the door against the storm. Then he crept to the younger man whose wide-open eyes were staring at him from a thin, white, strangely contorted face, and put his arms about him, holding his head closely against his breast.
"You're all right now, Peter," he comforted in a broken, gasping voice. "You're all right——" He tried to laugh as his frozen fingers wiped the snow from the other's hair. "We're home and it's warm and I'll get something to eat——"
He crawled to the stove, almost crooning in his joy, and opened the iron door to thrust in more wood. The flames lighted up his face, bloodless from the cold and wet with snow that had already begun to melt and trickle down his cheeks to his bare neck and chest. His hair glistened white—whiter, it seemed, than an hour ago; his breath came huskily as if driven through a sieve; he was a crumpled, frozen, wind-broken wreck, and yet as he turned from the flaming door of the stove to look at the man on the floor there was a strange miracle of triumph and happiness riding over the torture in his face and a smile was on his lips. The storm might beat and howl outside and all the evils of darkness might scream and rage to get in for all he cared now. He had saved his boy!
He rose to his feet and stood swaying for a moment, smiling, trying to speak. Then he fell upon a cot.
The man on the floor had pulled himself to his elbow. He put a mittened hand to his throat as if to free himself from fingers that were gripping him there. His face too was bloodless. It was a thin face, driven white and hard by exhaustion and pain. He was a man who had been close to death and the shadow of it was still in his eyes.