For three days, the snow, and the wind, and the great cold had scourged the prairies, and the storm was almost an early blizzard in its wild fury, in the confusion of air-currents and always-falling, never-resting white flakes, tipped with ice, and stinging like fire. And for these three days Dick and Peter Many-Names had gone blindly on their painful way, trusting to the Indian's sense of direction, yet not knowing where they were going. An Indian's bump of locality is a marvellously developed organ; but it is of little use in a blizzard. And now the two lads were staggering forward, with no hope that they were keeping to the right path--one in stoic resignation, the other in a passion of regret and despair. They were almost exhausted, and only kept moving through fear of that snow-sleep from which there is no awakening. Even this fear had now become dulled through cold and weariness. When the blizzard first struck them, Dick's obstinacy had changed to a very lively realisation of danger. "We will turn back now, if you like," he had said somewhat shamefacedly. But Peter had given one of his rare, bitter laughs. "All too late," he had said grimly. "Death behind as well as in front--everywhere. P'raps so we go on we find band of Indians that we followed. P'raps we do. All too late go back now, too late." And, with those words in their ears, they had faced the unsheltered prairie and the strength of the storm. For the first day hope had been left to them, for they could judge their direction from the steady, cutting wind. But, after that, the wind began to shift constantly, and thus their only guide failed them. A prairie is not as bare of all landmarks as a lawn, but one buffalo-wallow is much like another, one poplar-bluff is not distinguishable from the next, and most sloughs have a family likeness to each other, especially when one's circle of vision is limited to a couple of yards' radius, and everything beyond is blotted out with pitiless, hurrying, scurrying clouds of white flakes. Dick was utterly lost. "Where are we? Where are we?" he kept saying. "Is the whole world turning to snow?" And sometimes, angrily, "I know you are going the wrong way, Peter. I know you are." Whereupon he would stumble off by himself, and the Indian would follow and drag him back again. "No right, no wrong, no anything," Peter exclaimed angrily in answer; "but you must not go round, round, round in circles. That what you doing, an' if you do so, you die pretty quick. You come on with me." And actually they had kept a straighter course than they knew, or than they would have dared to hope, thanks to the Indian's sense of direction. The first night they passed in the shelter of a large bluff of aspens, and were not very much the worse for it. It was then that they somehow lost one of their ponies through inexcusable carelessness in securing it, and it was after that also that they began to lose hope.