“What’s it for?”
“It’s to go round your waist. I don’t want to lose you”—smiling briefly—“if you should stumble into deep snow.”
“Deep snow? But it’s only been snowing an hour or so!” she objected.
“Evidently you don’t know what a blizzard can accomplish in the way of drifting during the course of an ‘hour or so.’ I do.”
Deftly he fastened the strap round her waist, and, taking the loose end, gave it a double turn about his wrist before gripping it firmly in his hand.
“Now, keep close behind me. Regard me”—laughing shortly—“as a snow-plough. And if I go down deep rather suddenly, throw your weight backward as much as you can.”
He moved forward, advancing cautiously. He was badly handicapped by the lack of even a stick with which to gauge the depth of drifting snow in front of him, and he tested each step before trusting his full weight to the delusive, innocent-looking surface.
Jean went forward steadily beside him, a little to the rear. The snow was everywhere considerably more than ankle-deep, and at each step she could feel that the slope of the ground increased and with it the depth of the drift through which they toiled.
The cold was intense. The icy fingers of the snow about her feet seemed to creep upward and upward till her whole body felt numbed and dead, and as she stumbled along in the Englishman’s wake, buffeted and beaten by the storm, her feet ached as if leaden weights were attached to them.
But she struggled on pluckily. The man in front of her was taking the brunt of the hardship, cutting a path for her, as it were, with his own body as he forged ahead, and she was determined not to add to his work by putting any weight on the strap which bound them together.