"He sits there rubbin’ his head an’ cussin’ steadily, an’ I ’m so moved by it that I compliments him. He jumps an’ bumps his head again, an’ looks at me close. ’D—d if you ain’t a husky corpse,’ he says. That settles it. I ain’t crazy, like I was hopin’, but I ’in dead. ’You an’ me is on th’ ragged edge of h—l,’ he adds. "’But who tipped _you_ off?’ I asks. ’They just shoved me in here an’ did n’t tell me nothin’ at all.’ "’Crazy as th’ devil,’ he grunts, lookin’ at me harder. "’Yo ’re a liar,’ I replies. ’I may be dead, but d—d if I ’m crazy!’ "’An’ I don’t blame you, either,’ he mused, sorrowful. ’Now you keep quiet till I gets somethin’ to eat,’ an’ he crawls into a li’l round hole at th’ other end of th’ room. "Purty soon I smell smoke again, an’ after a long time he comes back with some hot coffee an’ burned meat. I grab for th’ grub, an’ while I ’m eatin’ I demands to know where I am. "He laughs, real cheerful, an’ tells me. I ’m under his waggin, surrounded by canvas an’ any G—d’s quantity of snow. Th’ drift over us is fifteen foot high, th’ wind has died down, an’ it’s still snowin’ so hard he can’t see twenty feet. It is also away down below freezin’. "We stayed under that drift ’most three weeks, livin’ on raw meat after our firewood gave out. We didn’t suffer none from th’ cold, though, under all that snow an’ with all th’ blankets we had. When it stopped snowin’ we discovered a drift shamefully high about a mile northeast of us, an’ from th’ smoke comin’ out of it I knew it was th’ bunkhouse. "Well, to cut it short, it was. An’ mebby Buck wasn’t glad to see me! He was worried ’most sick an’ as soon as we could, we got cayuses and started out to look for th’ others, scared stiff at what we expected to find." He paused and was silent a moment. "But only Ace was missin’," he added. "We found him an’ th’ rustlers later, when th’ snow went off." He paused again and shook his head. "It shore was a miracle that we did n’t go with ’em, all of us, except Buck. Pete was so plumb disgusted with travelin’ in th’ winter, an’ had lost his cayuses, that when Buck offers him Ace’s bunk he stays. An’ he ain’t never left us since. Huh! Cold? That cub don’t know nothin’—mebby he will when he grows up, but I dunno, at that. _Idyho_!" IX THE DRIVE The Norther was a thing of the past, but it left its mark on Buck Peters, whose grimness of face told what the winter had been to him. His daily rides over the range, the reports of his men since that deadly storm had done a great deal to lift the sagging weight that rested on his shoulders; but he would not be sure until the round-up supplied facts and figures.