That deadly, comfortable feeling left me at once. I felt about in the darkness and touched boards. It was a cabin! With my half-frozen hands I hammered at the woodwork, and I shall never forget my feelings as a door opened and I was pulled in out of the storm, the door banging to behind me.
I couldn’t speak for a minute, and my eyes were blurred coming in from the darkness and snow, but when they got accustomed to what little light there was I didn’t feel I wanted to say much.
Before me was a giant. He must have stood a good six-foot-six, but all I could see of his face was his eyes. He was masked in what was called in those days a “storm-cap,” which completely hid the face of the wearer, showing only the eyes. A long, heavy overcoat, with collar upturned, reached to his ankles.
“Having arrived here, stranger,” he remarked, in an unpleasant, metallic sort of voice, with a half laugh, “and it now being near Christmas Eve, I’d be interested in knowing how you managed to bump up against this building.”
This was not the sort of greeting one would have expected under the circumstances, and the man’s language did not smack of the prairie, but I was too weak after my exertions and too thankful to be out of the storm to notice trifles, and so I told him as briefly as possible that I was lost, and should be grateful if he would give me shelter for the night.
“Shelter?” said he. “Shelter? Yes, why not? All the shelter a man could want. I wouldn’t turn a dog out such a night like this. Yes, stranger, you can sleep here to-night, nice and quiet. I’ve nothing to give you to eat, but there’s whisky here. Being nearly Christmas Eve, drink up, and then—go up!”
As he spoke he poured whisky from a demi-john into two tin mugs and picked up a lantern. Then, for the first time, I saw there was a rough ladder, up which he went to a room above.
Now all shacks, dug-outs, and cabins I had seen hitherto were of only one storey. There was something uncanny about the man and the place, and tired and knocked up as I was I did not drink the whisky; I just wetted my lips with it as my host’s feet clumped around above, and ere he descended I carefully poured the contents of the tin cup into the ramshackle stove.
“Now, up you go and sleep the sleep you’ve asked for,” said he, when he came down. “A merry Christmas to you!” With that he tossed off his whisky at a gulp.
Up I went through the rough opening; it was not a trap-door, for there was no flap to shut down. I found myself in a kind of loft, in which was a wooden apology for a bed, heaped over with some evil-smelling blankets. All this I saw by the light of a guttering candle stuck in the neck of a cracked bottle. Though I was very, very weary, all thoughts of going to sleep went out of my head. I distrusted that sinister-looking fellow below.