The air was very keen. Many of the bushes by the way had shriveled during the night as though before a furnace blast.
“Black frost,” said the younger girl. “Old Steve and Andy know their little book. Sam says Steve told him there was a blizzard coming. We won’t ride far to-day, Betty.”
“A blizzard? Only fancy,” murmured the Eastern girl.
She was not much impressed. She had no experience—even of New England winter storms—to enable her to judge the nature of a storm in these Western mountains.
But Nell should have known better than to lead the way into a gulch which quite shut them in from sight of the surrounding country. A blizzard is a chancy thing; and often the first storm of a Western winter is the worst of all.
They rode to a spring at which deer drank; they saw many tracks, but there were none of the pretty creatures in sight. Birds fluttered through the chaparral with strange cries, and the rabbits ran back and forth as though much disturbed by domestic happenings.
“I never saw them jacks so queer acting,” said Nell thoughtfully. “We’d better ride home, Betty.”
“Why?” asked the other girl gayly. “You are not afraid they will attack us, are you?”
“Not that,” and the Western-born young woman smiled. “But there’s something comin’, I reckon—just as Steve and Andy say.”
Before they rode up out of the gulch they heard something slashing like a multitude of knives through the dead leaves overhead. When they rode out into the open they beheld the thick cloud that had almost reached the zenith, and out of that cloud came not snow, but ice!