The team at once stopped and began cramping the sled as they tried to back into the wind. Stepping up onto the tongue, Grahame placed a hand on the hip of either horse and spoke to them. His voice was lost in the rush of the wind, but they felt his touch, and it steadied them. They obeyed his pull on the line and turned into the wind again. There came a rippling of mighty muscles beneath his hand. The sharp steel calks bit deep into snow and ice, and the front runners were wrenched back into the road, and again the long steel shoes took up their whining song of protest against the cold. * * * * * For two long hours Grahame had been floundering beside the sled. Several times when he felt himself becoming chilled, he walked in deep snow until nearly exhausted; then he placed one hand on the box and allowed the team to pull him forward. He could see little of the horses and nothing on either side; nor did he look, for his eyes were fixed on the silver-white ribbon of hard-packed snow beneath the runner at his feet. The presence of that narrow sleigh track meant the difference between life and death. If he held it, he was safe; if he lost it even for a moment, it might mean the end. The blinding white of late afternoon changed to the gray of sunset, and still the big team fought on. Their breath came in rapid puffs of white vapor, while long slender icicles hung from their nostrils. Grahame’s eyelashes froze to the lower lids and he rubbed them apart with his mitten. His collar had become a mass of ice, and a double handful of snow had driven through the tiny opening to pack solidly around his throat. Little by little the cold was driving through his clothing as well. He felt it first in his fingers, and he beat them against his sides, but the motion seemed to pump cold air up his sleeves for he felt it under his arms. The team stopped, and Grahame went to investigate. There was a dark shadow ahead, which as he approached resolved itself into another team and sled, evidently going the same way as himself; but the team had stopped and swung the tongue around until they stood back to the storm. The spring seat had fallen from its place, and now dangled from one clamp. In the bottom of the box was the huddled body of a man--a man whom he vaguely recognized by his strangely scarred face as Fred Kinear, a newcomer in the neighborhood. A hasty examination convinced Grahame that life was not extinct, and he set about the only course that might save the flickering spark. Working as fast as was possible with half-numb fingers, he unharnessed and turned loose the stranger’s team. Trying to force them against the storm to a place they did not know would be worse than useless, and once free from sled and harness, they would drift with the storm until they found shelter in a coulee or behind a hill. Pulling the pin from the eveners, he changed his own team to the other sled.