"What ails you, hein?" Weimer finally demanded.
And Ross, with a lump in his throat of which he was not ashamed, told him.
"Ach!" exclaimed Weimer disgustedly. He snapped his thumb and finger together. "I vas here dree vinters alone mit no one near. Py day I vorked. Py night dem volves howl und cayotes; but," consolingly, "dey can’t git in, und dey vant nicht to git in."
Then for the first time he went on to relate to Ross in his quaint and broken English many stories of those lonely winters in this solitary valley, which had then held him as its only inhabitant.
"No wonder," thought Ross, listening to the fury of the storm, "that the old man’s mind was ready to give away under the additional trial of an attack of snow-blindness."
The blizzard continued in unabated fury all the next day. Neither Weimer nor Ross visited the tunnel. They remained housed, watching the snow gradually pile itself around the little shack until the two small windows were obscured, and they were obliged to resort to candle-light.
But during the night the wind changed, and the following morning the sun rose in a brilliantly blue sky. Directly after an early breakfast Ross started to shovel a way out of the cabin. He dug the snow away from the door and windows, and then turned his attention to the trail leading to the tunnel. Here he found that the wind had favored him, sweeping the path clean and filling up the hollows. In the valley the snow lay seven feet deep.
Ross worked his way to the ore-dump, at the base of which he paused to look down on the McKenzies. Their cabin was also released from the snow as to door and window. The snow was also tramped and shoveled around the discovery hole, but no one was in sight, and Ross had turned again to his task when a yell caused him again to face the McKenzie cabin.
Sandy was gesticulating frantically while he advanced rapidly on snow-shoes, dodging the trees as he came diagonally across the mountainside. He came on, talking at the top of his voice, but all Ross could catch was "sticks" and "thief" and "trail." Sandy was plainly excited. His neckerchief was knotted under one ear; his coat was buttoned up awry; his cap was on with one ear-flap dangling, and the other held fast by the rim of the cap. His ears and nose were scarlet, the thermometer registering, that morning, thirty below zero.
"Our dynamite is gone," Sandy yelled when he was near enough to make Ross understand. "Gone–stolen."