from the storm.  A strange and delicious sense of warmth and drowsiness steals over you; you sink lower, and feel the cold soft whiteness sifting over neck and cheek and forehead:  but you do not care.  The struggle is over; and—­in the morning the sun glints coldly over a new landscape of gently undulating alabaster.  Yonder is a little hillock which marks the place where the blizzard overtook its prey.  Sometime, when the warm March winds have thawed the snow, some gaunt wolf will snuff about this spot, and send up the long howl that calls the pack to the banquet.

Such thoughts as these were a part of our lives then, and with such thoughts my mind was filled as I stepped out into the storm, my trousers tied down over my boots with bag-strings; my fur cap drawn down over my eyes, my blue military overcoat flapping about my legs; the cape of it wrapped about my head, and tied with a woolen comforter.

3

Through these wrappings, a strange sound came to my ears—­the sound of sleigh-bells; and in a moment, so close were they, there emerged from the whirl of snow, a team of horses drawing a swell-body cutter, in which sat a man driving, wrapped up in buffalo robes and blankets until the box of the sleigh was filled.  The horses came to a stop in the lee of my house.  There had been no such rig in the county before I had gone to the war.

“Is this the Vandemark schoolhouse?” came from the man in the cutter.

“No, Captain,” said I; for discipline is strong, “this is my farm.”

“Ah, it’s you, Mr. Vandemark, is it?” said he.  “Can you tell me the way to the schoolhouse?”

Discipline flew off into the storm.  I never for a moment harbored the idea that I was to allow Buck Gowdy to rescue Virginia from the blizzard, and carry her off into either danger or safety.  There was none of my Dutch hesitation here.  This was battle; and I behaved with as much prompt decision as I did on the field of Shiloh, where, I have the captain’s word for it in writing, I behaved with a good deal of it.

“Never mind about the schoolhouse,” I said.  “I’ll attend to that!’

“The hell you will!” said he, in that calm way of his.  “Let me see.  Your house faces the north.  These trees are on the section line....  The schoolhouse is....  I have it, now.  Sorry to cut in ahead of you; but—­get up, Susie—­Winnie, go on!”

But I had Susie and Winnie by the bits.

“Vandemark,” he said, and as he shouted this to make me hear I could feel the authority I had grown to recognize in drill, “you forget yourself!  Let go those horses!”

“Not by a damned sight!”

I found myself swearing as if I were in the habit of it.

Now the man in any kind of rig with another holding his horses’ bits is in an embarrassing fix.  He can’t do anything so long as he remains in the vehicle; and neither can his horses.  He must carry the fight to the other man, or be made a fool of.