Tibby lost courage, and laying her face on the poor beast’s neck, sobbed in despair. Oh! why had she been so wilful and neglectful of Donald’s warning? He had been anxious about her, and tried to save her, but she had in her silly pride and egotism ignored him and his counsel, and now she must die. How cold she was. Her breath came in short, hard pants. The wind seemed to take it from her and carry it away. It seemed to her that the elements sported with life, and the wind, with demoniac shrieks of frenzy and laughter, pounded and pommeled and bruised her as she lay upon the neck of the trembling, cowering beast which had borne her so gallantly that morning. “O Tempest, Tempest, we are surely lost, lost!” she wailed. “God has let loose all his furies upon us; no where on the bleak, cold, storm-driven and storm-beaten prairie is there shelter for us. If a stable were but a rod away we could not find it. We must die, must die, good horse! Die—i—i—i—ie!” Her chattering teeth would scarcely permit the words to pass. Tibby tried to pray, but the words would not form themselves. She could only think of her child’s prayer of “Now I lay me down to sleep,” and she remembered reading once of a man who, upon the neck of a maddened bull, thus prayed, and in a hysterical revulsion of emotion she laughed,—laughed and shrieked with the shrieking wind, in hysterical gasps,—laughed even in the face of death. Then, chill and trembling, she felt as if the hand of the grim reaper was upon her, and she lay motionless upon the neck of the horse, half unconscious. Suddenly she was startled by a sound—the crack of a rifle not far distant. The horse started and lifted its head, then whirled around again in the direction of the sound. She felt the quiver of the animal beneath her, and with an effort roused herself. There was hope in that sound. Some one was near. “Go, Tempest, go!” she cried. “There is some one near! Some one is looking for us!” The horse, as if understanding the meaning of the rifle-shot, was already plunging forward, and Tibby clung sobbing, in convulsive reaction, to his neck. She tried to shout, but the howling wind drowned even her powerful and far-reaching voice. It was blowing fearfully now. Each gust nearly tore her from the saddle by its violence, benumbed as she was by the cold. Again the friendly rifle-crack sounded its peal of deliverance in her ears. And farther away she heard, more faintly, a second sound, like an echo, respond.