It seemed madness to go out in such a storm. But the Pathfinder had never failed them yet. And within twenty minutes they had started, Jami and she, bundled and gloved and mittened, the Pathfinder’s powerful lights searching through driving snow that swirled and sifted between the closed storm-curtains until she and Jami looked like two snow figures. Pushing, plowing, slipping, skidding ahead, stopping, they went, Raquel’s hands stiff, glued to the wheel, and they had been gone only twenty minutes. And back there a baby lay gasping for its life. “Not through the pasture yet,” shouted Jami. But at length they made the upper gate and, once on the slopes, with a clean-swept frozen road beneath the wheels, the car seemed to take the gale between its teeth as it roared swift and straight up to the pass. The blast that struck them as they reached the top made the ascent seem like balmy weather. Tears of pain from the cold rolled down Raquel’s face and froze there, and for a moment she had to release the wheel to Jami, who would all too willingly have driven the whole way. The descent on the other side was made rapidly, and fairly easily. They seemed to aeroplane down through bitter arctic spaces, but when they came to enter the tiny mining town drifts mounted, choking, smothering them. The engine labored, roared like a baffled giant, and only when it had been fed with the thermos flask of hot coffee did it gather itself together, and plow up over the freezing masses of snow. They stood at length within Doc Merrick’s house. He pulled them toward a leaping fire. The clock on the mantel showed ten, nearly an hour and a half since Raquel had looked down at the sick child in Esquibal’s house. “Esquibal’s baby, Doc. It looks like pneumonia. I’m afraid she’s dying, and it took so long to come.” Doc Merrick, tall, splendidly broad and bronzed, lived at the pass through the grace of God and the rare air of the mountain top, with one active lung, two active dogs and three inactive servants. Already he was buttoning his coat with one hand while he handed Raquel a cup of hot coffee with the other. And then, with two hot-water bottles for the Pathfinder, they were outside again. And they had need of the hot water, for the force of the wind broke the momentum of the long coast from the pass, and they reached the arroyo without any speed and a cold engine. They had to stop, to back, and to rush at the heavy drifts that had piled up. It seemed an eternity until the car plowed up to its own shed and slid in. When they reached the _casita_, the doctor went from one cot to the other and then set to work over wee Luisita. Raquel and Mom, who had come without being summoned, were at his elbow, Elena and Pancho were thrust into the next room, where Panchito slept safely. If once Elena’s volcanic weeping were to start it would be beyond control.