Then in a blind stupidity I began to hear a voice in my ears, and to find myself lunging back and forth and stumbling lamely on my left foot. The right foot had no feeling, no power of motion, and I forgot that I had it.
"What are you doing, Pete?" I asked, when I recognized who it was that was holding me.
Pete was like an elder brother, always doing me a kind service.
"Trying to keep you from freezing to death," he replied.
"Oh, let me go. It's so easy," I answered back drowsily.
"By golly, I've a notion to do it." Pete's laugh was a tonic in itself. "Here you and your horse are both down, and you can't stand on one of your feet. I'll bet it's froze, and you about to go over the River; and when a fellow tries to pull you back you say, 'Oh, let me go!' You darned renegade! you ought to go."
He was doing his best for me all the time, and he had begun none too soon, for Death had swooped down near me, and I was ready to give up the struggle. The warmth of the horse's body had saved one foot, but as to the other—the little limp I shall always have had its beginning in that night's work.
The next day was Thanksgiving, although we did not know it. There are no holy days or gala days to men who are famishing. That day the command had no food except the few hackberries we found and the bark of the trees we gnawed upon. It was the hardest day of all the march.
Pete, who had pulled me back from the valley of the shadow the night before, in his search for food that day, found a luckless little wild-cat. And that cat without sauce or dressing became his Thanksgiving turkey.
The second night was bitterly cold, and then came a third day of struggling through deep snows on hilly prairies, and across canyon-guarded bridgeless streams. The milestones of our way were the poor bodies of our troop horses that had given up the struggle, while their riders pushed resolutely forward.