Some great idea, partaking of the nature of inspiration, had come to her. He saw it in the growing light in her eyes, the deepening of the soft lines of her face. All at once she sprang to her feet. "Bruce!" she cried. "Perhaps there's a way yet. A long, long chance, but maybe a way yet. Get your rifle--Simon's is broken--and come with me." Without waiting for him to rise she struck off into the storm, following the huge footprints of the bear. The man struggled with himself, summoned all that was left of his reserve supply of strength, and leaped up. He snatched his rifle from the ground where Simon had thrown it, and in an instant was beside her. Her cheeks were blazing. "Maybe it just means further torture," she confessed to him, "but don't you want to make every effort we can to save ourselves? Don't you want to fight till the last breath?" She glanced up and saw her answer in the growing strength of his face. Then his words spoke too. "As long as the slightest chance remains," he replied. "And you'll forgive me if it comes to nothing?" He smiled, dimly. She took fresh heart when she saw he still had strength enough to smile. "You don't have to ask me that." "A moment ago an idea came to me--it came so straight and sure it was as if a voice told me," she explained hurriedly. She didn't look at him again. She kept her eyes intent upon the great footprints in the snow. To miss them for a second meant, in that world of whirling snow, to lose them forever. "It was after the bear had killed Simon and had gone away. He acted exactly as if he thought of something and went out to do it--exactly as if he had a destination in view. Didn't you see--his anger seemed to die in him and he started off in the _face of the storm_. I've watched the ways of animals too long not to know that he had something in view. It wasn't food; he would have attacked the body of the horse, or even Simon's body. If he had just been running away or wandering, he would have gone with the wind, not against it. He was weakened from the fight, perhaps dying--and I think--" He finished the sentence for her, breathlessly. "That he's going toward shelter." "Yes. You know, Bruce--the bears hibernate every year. They always seem to have places all chosen--usually caverns in the hillsides or under uprooted trees--and when the winter cuts off their supplies of food they go straight toward them. That's my one hope now--that the Killer has gone to some cave he knows about to hibernate until this storm is over. I think from the way he started off, so sure and so straight, that it's near. It would be dry and out of the storm, and if we could take it away from him we could make a fire that the snow wouldn't put out. It would mean life--and we could go on when the storm is over." "You remember--we have only one cartridge." "Yes, I know--I heard you fire. And it's only a thirty-thirty at that. It's a risk--as terrible a risk as we've yet run. But it's a chance."