At 4:30 he was ready to start. Few men are his match for staying up all night and looking as fresh as a mountain daisy after the vigil. He opened the door and a blizzard swept in and tried to rush him off his feet. Through the whirling drift staggered Walter, dogless. "Where are those dogs?" asked the Doctor. He expects men to keep agreements made with him. He couldn't get through the length and breadth of his big day's work if they didn't. Walter shook his snow-covered head. "I ain't brought 'em, sir. It's too bad a night to be startin' before sun-up. The dogs don't know each other: they comes from here, there an' all over. They'll be fightin' in the traces an' eatin' each other up in the dark. Us must be able to see 'em in order to drive 'em. You know what dogs is like, sir." "Yes, I do," said Grenfell. "But you're the driver, and I leave it to you. We must get off as soon as we can." Dr. Grenfell went to his room to snatch a catnap before the start. Another telegram woke him as he was drowsing off. "Come along soon. Wife worse." The storm instead of going down was more violent than ever when the grey day came. The sun was not seen at all. On the contrary, the air was filled with a mad whirl of pelting, stinging flakes almost as hard as Indian arrow-heads. The dogs would be no good in the teeth of such a storm--for the team-mates who work with a will are those that are best acquainted, and with an unknown driver this team suddenly thrown together would have pulled as many different ways as there were fierce and headstrong dogs. They would be at each other's throats before they were out of sight of the houses. As he waited, walking restlessly up and down, in his brown sweater and thick leggins, Grenfell was plagued with the picture of the woman fighting for her life till help should come from the one man who could give it. Still another of those telegrams! This time the message read: "Come immediately if you can. Wife still holding out." Just as he read the words, there were voices, and battering hands at the door. Two men, white as Santa Claus from head to foot, staggered into the room, with the wind whooping at their backs as if in a wild anger that they escaped its clutches. Grenfell, accustomed as he was to the brave men of a hard country, fairly gasped when he saw them. "Where did you come from?" "We comes to fetch you, sir, for the sick woman at Cape Norman." "Do you think dogs can get me there now?" the Doctor asked, anxiously. "No, sir. We was blown here most o' the way, wi' the wind at our backs. The wind drove us. The dogs can't make head against it, not till the wind shifts clean round the other way, sir." Ten miles of their journey had been in the fairly sheltered lee of the land. Twenty miles had been before the pitiless sweep of the wind over the unprotected sea-ice. If the snow had not drifted so heavily, they would have been borne along at a pace so rapid that their sled would have been wrecked.