“Ow,” he grunted. “This little––just little.” Then he pointed ahead. “Big, white––all white. No, no; white-man no come dis way. Bimeby neche so,” and Rainy-Moon made a motion of lying down and sleeping. He meant that they would get lost and die in the snow.
Grey became angry.
“Get on,” he shouted. And Rainy-Moon reluctantly turned and started his dogs afresh.
The little party ascended the sloping path. The whipping snow lashed their faces as the wind rushed it up from the ground in rapidly thickening clouds. The fierce gusts were concentrating into a steady shrieking blast. A grey cloud of snow, thin as yet, but plainly perceptible, was in the air. The threat it conveyed was no idle one. The terror of the blizzard was well known to those people. And they knew that in a short space they would have to seek what shelter they might chance to find upon these almost barren mountains.
The white-men tightened the woollen scarves about the storm-collars of their coats, and occasionally beat their mitted hands against their sides. The gathering wind was intensifying the cold.
“If this goes on we shall have to make that belt of pinewoods for shelter,” observed Robb Chillingwood practically. “It won’t do to take chances of losing the dogs––and their load––in the storm. What say?”
They had rounded a bend and Grey was watchfully 21 gazing ahead. He did not seem to hear his companion’s question. Suddenly he pointed directly along the path towards a point where it seemed to vanish between two vast crags.
“Smoke,” he said. And his tone conveyed that he wished his companion to understand that he, Grey, had been right about the trail, and that Robb had been wrong. “That’s Dougal’s store,” he went on, after a slight pause.
Chillingwood looked as directed. He saw the rush of smoke which, in the rising storm, was ruthlessly swept from the mouth of a piece of upright stove-pipe, which in the now grey surroundings could just be distinguished.
“But I thought there was a broad, open trail at Dougal’s,” he said, at last, after gazing for some moments at the tiny smoke-stack.