He followed the path of least resistance. It took him down hill into a draw. His stumbling steps zigzagged toward a lower level and he followed the arroyo to its mouth. A slight dip in the ground swung him to the right.
His boots were clogged with snow. The muscles of his thighs were so weary that each time he dragged a leg out of the drifts it felt as though weighted with a cannon ball. There were times when he could make ground only by throwing his body forward and beating down the white bank that obstructed the way. Still he crawled on, an indomitable atom of fighting humanity in a great frozen desert of death.
A groping hand struck something solid. The stiff fingers of the hand searched the surface of the barrier. Hugh’s heart renewed hope. He had come up against a pile of corded wood. It was cut in short lengths to fit a stove. The chances were that somewhere within fifty feet of him was a house.
But where? In what direction? The fury of the storm filled the night, made it opaque as a wall. He could not see five feet in front of him. The landmark that he had found he dared not leave, for if he wandered from it the chances were that he would never find it again. It would be of no use to shout. The shrieking wind would drown a voice instantly. Yet he did call out, again and again.
The thing he did was born of the necessity of the situation. He dug aside the snow from the top of the pile and with a loose piece of wood hammered free others from the niche into which they were frozen. How he did this he could never afterwards tell, for his muscles were so paralyzed from cold that they would scarcely answer the call his will made on them.
Then, hard and straight, he flung a stick out into the storm. His reserves of strength were nearly gone, but he held himself to the job before him. One after another he threw the pieces of firewood, following a definite plan as to direction, in such a way as to make the place where he stood the centre of a circle. His hope was to strike the house. If he could do this, and if the door happened to be on the side of the house nearest him, then the light of the lamp would perhaps penetrate into the storm so that he could see it.
He knew it was a gamble with all the odds against him. He was backing a series of contingencies each one of which must turn in his favour if he was to win.
He collapsed on the woodpile at last from sheer physical exhaustion. For a few moments he lay there, helpless, drifting toward that sleep from which he would never awake in this world. But the will to live still struggled feebly. He was of that iron breed which has won the West for civilization against untold odds. It was not in him to give up as long as he could force his tortured body forward.
Even now he did not forget the craft of the frontiersman which reads signs and makes deductions from them. The corded wood was two lengths deep. Near one end there was a sag in it two or three feet deep. This depression was greater on the side next Hugh. He reasoned that it is human nature to choose the easiest way. The people who lived in the house would use first that part of the wood which was nearest. Therefore it followed that the house must be on the same side of the corded pine as he was, and it must be closest to the place from which the wood had been carried to the kitchen stove.
He struck out at a right angle from the pile. Before he had gone three steps he stumbled and fell. His prostration was so complete that he could not at once get to his feet again. He lay inert for a time, then crawled up again and lurched forward. A second time his knees buckled under him. As he fell, an outstretched hand hit the wall of the house.