“I may glide, but I haven't any wind left,” confessed Seabury. “It's only practice you know. I've used them ever since I was a little kid, and compared to some of the fellows up home, I'm nowhere. Do you think we ought to go any farther? I felt some snow on my face just then.”
“Oh, sure!” said Hedges, bluffly. “A little snow won't hurt us, anyhow, and we can skee down in no time at all. Let's not go back just yet.”
Presently they started on again, and though Seabury kept silent, he was far from comfortable in his mind. He had had more than one unpleasant experience with sudden winter storms. It seemed to him wiser to turn back at once, but he was afraid of suggesting it again lest Hedges think him a quitter.
A little later, still mounting the narrow, winding trail, they came upon a rough log hut, aged and deserted, with a sagging, half-open door; but the two boys, unwilling to take off their skees, did not stop to investigate it.
Every now and then during the next half mile trifling little gusts of stinging snowflakes whirled down from the leaden sky, beat against their faces, and scurried on. Seabury's feeling of nervous apprehension increased, but Hedges, in his careless, self-confident manner merely laughed and said that the trip home would be all the more interesting for little diversions of that sort.
The words were scarcely spoken when, from the distance, there came a curious, thin wailing of the wind, rising swiftly to a dull, ominous roar. Startled, both boys stopped abruptly, and stared up the slope. And as they did so, something like a vast, white, opaque curtain surged over the crest of the hill and swept swiftly toward them.
Almost before they could draw a breath it was upon them, a dense, blinding mass of snow, which whirled about them in choking masses and blotted out the landscape in a flash.
“Wough!” gasped Hedges. “Some speed to that! I guess we'd better beat it, kid, while the going's good.”
But even Hedges, with his easy, careless confidence, was swiftly forced to the realization that the going was very far from good even then. It was impossible to see more than a dozen yards ahead of them. As a matter of course, the older fellow took the lead, but he had not gone far before he ran off the track and only saved himself from a spill by grabbing a small tree.
“Have to take it easy,” he commented, recovering his balance. “This storm will let up soon; it can't possibly last long this way.”