About nine o’clock, Sandy yawned and stretched. “What do you say we turn in, pal?” he said to Jerry.
“I’m with you,” Jerry replied promptly.
The boys looked inquiringly at the older men. “You two run along,” Dr. Steele told them. “We’ll finish our pipes first.”
Sandy and Jerry dug their mackinaws and mittens out of a heap of clothing on the long table in the vestibule and slipped on their boots.
“It’s only a hundred-yard walk,” Sandy admitted, “but at thirty below zero it’s worth the trouble.”
“Amen,” Jerry agreed, wrapping his wool muffler around his lantern jaw.
The boys stepped out the back door of the big hut and followed the path leading back to the cabins. Ten feet away from the building, the wind-whipped grains of ice and snow closed in on them like a white curtain, blotting out their vision. If it had not been for the clearly defined path, they would have been helpless.
“You could get lost in your own back yard in this stuff,” Jerry gasped. “Yipes!” he shouted as he blundered off the path into a snowdrift. “Where’s the St. Bernards?”
Sandy took his arm and guided him back on the path. Finally, a dark outline with a faint square of light in the center of it loomed up before them.
“Here we are,” Sandy shouted above the wind. “Home at last.”