If Sam did not regret his selection of a companion, still less did he question the venture they were making. As he reasoned out the plight of the party, there was more than the condition of Peter Groche to warrant the expedition. As things were, two or three days might pass before anybody realized that the club had gone astray in the woods. Mr. Kane would suppose the boys had followed the tote road to Coreytown, and had reached the village; while the people there had had no warning that the party was on the way, and so would have no cause to send out searchers for the wanderers. “Clear case of having to help ourselves,” Sam reflected; and pressed on determinedly. But it was slow work, exhausting and taking toll of brain as well as muscle. Sam was no longer reckoning time or distance. Sometimes he led; sometimes Orkney. Often both halted, and, dropping in the snow, lay there till one or the other staggered to his feet, and gave a hand to his comrade. They still kept to the valley, but by degrees were drawing away from the stream and climbing the right bank on a long diagonal. This resulted not so much from intention as from various obstacles encountered along the lower slope. The higher ground seemed to be clearer, the drifts not so deep. Once they came to a long stretch, where the gale had almost swept away the snow. Here they made easier progress, though it was far from rapid. In spite of their exertions the cold had laid numbing hold upon them, and their limbs were heavy as lead. It had come to be a question of endurance, of tenacity as well as courage. Their danger was great. In their plight they had to fight a constant temptation to pause over-long in the partly sheltered hollows among the drifts. There was another temptation to close their eyes and burrow deeper in the snow; but always one or the other roused to the fatal peril of yielding. Now it was Sam, and again it was Orkney, who shook off the numbing spell of the storm, and dragged the other from his resting place in the snow. There could be no turning back. Each understood that they must push on at all hazards. Both Orkney and Sam had heard tales of lives lost in the great blizzard of 1888, and other tales of men perishing in storms by no means so furious or prolonged as that famous tempest. Hardly a winter passed without claiming its victims even in the thickly settled region about Plainville; and though these unfortunates for the most part were thinly clad, poorly nourished tramps or human derelicts, there were not lacking instances of able-bodied men losing their way and succumbing to exposure. And here was a storm, not quite equaling the great blizzard, perhaps, yet accompanied by quite as bitter cold. So, at least, the boys were misled by no false estimate of their desperate straits. Dulled though their senses might be, they did not lose grasp of the truth that they must struggle on and on, so long as strength remained to put one foot before the other.