It was her last vituperative attempt, and perhaps for that reason was invested with a certain degree of sublimity.  It did her good, she privately informed the Duchess.  “Just you go out there and cuss, and see.”  She then set herself to the task of amusing “the child,” as she and the Duchess were pleased to call Piney.  Piney was no chicken, but it was a soothing and original theory of the pair thus to account for the fact that she didn’t swear and wasn’t improper.

When night crept up again through the gorges, the reedy notes of the accordion rose and fell in fitful spasms and long-drawn gasps by the flickering camp-fire.  But music failed to fill entirely the aching void left by insufficient food, and a new diversion was proposed by Piney,—­story-telling.  Neither Mr. Oakhurst nor his female companions caring to relate their personal experiences, this plan would have failed, too, but for the Innocent.  Some months before he had chanced upon a stray copy of Mr. Pope’s ingenious translation of the Iliad.  He now proposed to narrate the principal incidents of that poem—­having thoroughly mastered the argument and fairly forgotten the words—­in the current vernacular of Sandy Bar.  And so for the rest of that night the Homeric demigods again walked the earth.  Trojan bully and wily Greek wrestled in the winds, and the great pines in the canon seemed to bow to the wrath of the son of Peleus.  Mr. Oakhurst listened with quiet satisfaction.  Most especially was he interested in the fate of “Ash-heels,” as the Innocent persisted in denominating the “swift-footed Achilles.”

So with small food and much of Homer and the accordion, a week passed over the heads of the outcasts.  The sun again forsook them, and again from leaden skies the snow-flakes were sifted over the land.  Day by day closer around them drew the snowy circle, until at last they looked from their prison over drifted walls of dazzling white, that towered twenty feet above their heads.  It became more and more difficult to replenish their fires, even from the fallen trees beside them, now half hidden in the drifts.  And yet no one complained.  The lovers turned from the dreary prospect and looked into each other’s eyes, and were happy.  Mr. Oakhurst settled himself coolly to the losing game before him.  The Duchess, more cheerful than she had been, assumed the care of Piney.  Only Mother Shipton—­once the strongest of the party—­seemed to sicken and fade.  At midnight on the tenth day she called Oakhurst to her side.  “I’m going,” she said, in a voice of querulous weakness, “but don’t say anything about it.  Don’t waken the kids.  Take the bundle from under my head and open it.”  Mr. Oakhurst did so.  It contained Mother Shipton’s rations for the last week, untouched.  “Give ’em to the child,” she said, pointing to the sleeping Piney.  “You’ve starved yourself,” said the gambler.  “That’s what they call it,” said the woman, querulously, as she lay down again, and, turning her face to the wall, passed quietly away.