Wolfie had doctored himself, but the wound had got worse and worse, and at last the old fellow, in awful, never-ending pain, had drunk himself half-dead and completed the work with his trigger finger.
Meanwhile the weather had been growing gradually colder, and the wind started to moan as I fastened the door from the outside, after quitting that abode of death. The sky, too, was rapidly darkening, and Pete shook his head up and down and stamped uneasily.
Mounting, I rode off; but I had not been going long when, away in the distance, I heard the dismal, long-drawn howl of a prairie wolf, then another, and another. Not till that moment did it flash upon me what an all-round fool I was.
I had brought no revolver with me. It had started to snow, evening was drawing in, and there were those gaunt brutes in the distance—yet I had no protection against either the weather or the wolves. I touched up old Pete, and we started to travel fast for home.
We had not gone more than a mile farther before a real, genuine blizzard sprang up. How it came down! Waves, absolute waves of snow, whirred, cut, and beat about my face, while the wind howled and shrieked dismally.
Then I did the worst, most foolish thing a man could have done. I tried to guide old Pete! I steered him, and, though Pete knew better, he obeyed; and so, between a good old horse and a fool of a young man, we made a fine mess of it. We got lost, tangled up, with the snow whirling about us in sheets. Every minute it got deeper and thicker, and at last poor old Pete staggered, tried vainly to right himself, fell over, and collapsed.
Try as I would I couldn’t get him up, and—well, I fear I lost my nerve, what with the blinding snow and the distant howl of those wretched wolves.
As the snow beat down upon me, piling up pitilessly over the now stiffening form of the poor old horse, I thought it time to move on. To stay where I was meant being frozen to death, to go on might mean the same; but there was just a chance, and I stumbled forward and took the chance.
Heaven only knows how long I ploughed and pushed through those awful snow-drifts with the falling flakes eddying about me in clouds; I lost all account of time. I went stumbling blindly forward until I seemed not to be myself, but just some machine without feeling or hope, mechanically pulling one foot before the other, and groping through the freezing dark.
I was just beginning to experience a drowsy, comfortable feeling, when—bump!—the little sense left in me was nearly knocked out as my head struck against something hard.