"Be damned if I kin suffer it against my cheek any more," answered Knapps. "My ear and jaw are just frozen and my left eye's bunged up with ice." Twice more Stark addressed the sailor, but received no answer. Then, turning again, he found one shadow beside him instead of two. "Is that you, Stark?" "Ay, sir." "Where's Knapps?" "I'm afraid he's lost, sir. He would hold off a point. Had I sought him, I must have lost you." "Shout--shout with all your might. We may save him yet." They lifted their voices, but the piping of them was gulfed in the roar of the wind. The ice poured out of the darkness, and, despite the snow-blink, an awful circumambient gloom hid all things from their eyes. Only the wan upthrown illumination at their feet told of the snow beneath. "I implore you to be moving, sir. Right or wrong, we must hold on now," cried Stark, for he saw that his companion seemed to hesitate. "Knapps may be right. Can we have got too far east? However, 'tis all one. Blessed sleep's ahead, my poor boy. 'Tis good to die in the great Hand of God and not behind stone walls." "Don't speak of dying, Commodore. Get closer; take my arm and husband your strength as you may." Stark closed up on the other's left hand between his friend and the weather; but Miller appreciated the action and fought against it. "You shall not do this for me. I'm tougher, older, better seasoned!" "For love of life, speak no more," Stark answered. "Hold close. We may save each other." Now arm in arm, or sometimes hand in hand, but never apart, they battled through a dread hour of agony. Often they fell and bruised themselves upon ice and granite; often they dropped headlong into some snow-hidden rift; then surmounting it, they struggled on again, half blind, half strangled. Despite their tremendous exertions, no warmth to fight the wind, no heat of blood could either generate. They froze as they fought and their progress became very slow. They grew conscious of sloping land and passed where hills of stone rose to the right, while the storm, from lower levels, leapt upwards as it seemed out of some dark crater on the left of them. They had missed Siward's Cross by miles and now wandered under Fox Tor above the Mire. Each yearned to lie down and end it; and each knew that a longing to yield was in the heart of the other. For a moment they stood in deep snow where great rocks towered and broke the wind. Then Commodore Miller addressed Stark, and his dreamy, placid utterance sounded strange in the fury of the hour. Shouts and a frenzy of fear or of energy had better, chimed with the free and fearful forces of the air; but the American spoke like a spirit and looked upon these material phenomena of night and tempest as one already above their influences and beyond their power.