All went well, though slowly and with vast labor, for a few hundred yards; and then the girl stalled. Jim turned back, lifted her to her knees again and shook her again. "Are you frozen anywhere?" he asked, "I'm not cold," she replied faintly. "I'm tired out. Please leave me alone." He rubbed her face with handfuls of snow. She protested angrily and burst into tears. "Leave me be!" she sobbed. "Let me rest!" "You can't rest here!" he cried, and shook her roughly. "I've a shelter somewhere. It isn't far. You can rest there." She exerted herself again, but after a few yards subsided on her face and refused to budge. He struggled and argued with her in vain for several minutes, then realized that he was wasting his own strength for nothing. He unslung the snowshoes and pack and fastened the snowshoes to the collar of one of the dogs and the pack to the back of the other. Then he burrowed under the girl, raised himself to his hands and one knee beneath her and continued his journey. It was slow work. The dogs ceased to frisk. Jim was frequently forced to shake the girl from his back and extricate one or the other of the dogs from either its load or the drift. The dogs understood and did their best--but the snowshoes on the pack were ever-lastingly slipping around and dragging beneath them. Only Flora did not seem to understand or to make any effort to do so. She rolled off Jim's back when he wanted her to stay on, and several times roused herself sufficiently to clutch at his neck when he wanted to roll her off. And yet so unreasonable a thing is the human heart, the more trouble she gave him the more kindly did he feel toward her. All his bitterness had gone at the first glimpse of her lying helpless; and now that she made no effort to help herself, and exerted herself only to impede his progress, he felt only tenderness and admiration for her. The fact that she had not believed his word was forgotten; that she had thought him a shooter from ambush seemed a small thing; that she had thought him a coward--even that appeared a small matter now. She had come out alone to find him; that was the great thing! And she had admitted her shame for having thought meanly of him, and that was another great thing! So he struggled onward. The wind began to fail. It blew less violently, lifted the snow no more than five or six feet and dropped it almost immediately. It struck less frequently, baffled, and finally died away. Jim reached the thicket from which a thin plume of smoke arose straight into the still air. He freed the floundering dogs of their burdens, dragged the girl through the tangle and deposited her in the den and sank on his face beside her. He lay motionless for fully ten minutes, then turned over and sat up. Flora, too, was sitting up, with her back against the wall of brush and snow. Her eyes were open and their green gaze was fixed anxiously and wonderingly upon him.