Peter Many-Names shrugged his shoulders uneasily. "So," he said, "you go on if you will, I come with you. You my brother now, and I cannot leave you. But it is for true we go into death." And the ponies hung their heads and shivered restlessly before that steady, unceasing wind as they proceeded. But Dick kept his face turned obstinately northward, resolved that he would never yield.
It is written that "the stars in their courses fought against Sisera." And now the spirit of the wide prairies was to fight against Dick.
That night they found no game. And, by the morning, fine particles of icy snow gave an edge of steel to that steady, unceasing wind. By midday the sky was overcast, the wind increased, and the snow became thicker and thicker.
CHAPTER X.
In the Grip of the Storm.
A world of small, whirling, white flakes, rushing, eddying, drifting before a wind that continually shifted from one quarter to another; a cold, grey light filtering through this haze of stinging snow; a continuous, angry murmur, as the icy particles struck the tall, stiff, prairie grasses, sometimes deepening to a roar as the wind momentarily increased; and, in the midst of this unresting, resistless tumult, two dark figures staggering uncertainly northward, leading between them an almost exhausted pony, laden with the last remnants of their food.
For three days, the snow, and the wind, and the great cold had scourged the prairies, and the storm was almost an early blizzard in its wild fury, in the confusion of air-currents and always-falling, never-resting white flakes, tipped with ice, and stinging like fire. And for these three days Dick and Peter Many-Names had gone blindly on their painful way, trusting to the Indian's sense of direction, yet not knowing where they were going. An Indian's bump of locality is a marvellously developed organ; but it is of little use in a blizzard. And now the two lads were staggering forward, with no hope that they were keeping to the right path—one in stoic resignation, the other in a passion of regret and despair. They were almost exhausted, and only kept moving through fear of that snow-sleep from which there is no awakening. Even this fear had now become dulled through cold and weariness.
When the blizzard first struck them, Dick's obstinacy had changed to a very lively realisation of danger. "We will turn back now, if you like," he had said somewhat shamefacedly.
But Peter had given one of his rare, bitter laughs. "All too late," he had said grimly. "Death behind as well as in front—everywhere. P'raps so we go on we find band of Indians that we followed. P'raps we do. All too late go back now, too late." And, with those words in their ears, they had faced the unsheltered prairie and the strength of the storm.