Buck Gowdy was not a man to hesitate in such a case.  He carried the fight to me—­and I was glad to see him coming.  I had waited for this a long time.  I have no skill in describing fights, and I was too much engaged in this to remember the details.  How many blows were exchanged; what sort of blows they were; how much damage they did until the last, more than a cut lip on my part, I can not tell.  Why no more damage was done is clearer—­we were both so wrapped up as to be unable to do much.  I only know that at the last, I had Gowdy down in the snow right by my well-curb; and that without taking time to make any plan, I wrapped the well-rope around him so as to make it necessary for him to take a little time in getting loose; I wrote him a receipt for the team and rig, which N.V.  Creede tells me would not have done me any good; and I went out, very much winded, shut the door behind me, and getting into the cutter, drove off into the blizzard with Gowdy’s team and sleigh, leaving him rolling around on the floor unwinding the well-rope, swearing like a trooper, and in a warm room where there was plenty to eat.

“And in my opinion,” said N.V., “no matter how much girl there was at stake, the man that chose to go out into that storm when he could have let the job out was the fool in the case.”

It was less than a mile to the schoolhouse, which I was lucky to find at all.  I could not see it twenty feet away; but I was almost upset by a snow fort which the children had built, and taking this as the sure sign of a playground, I guessed my way the fifty or sixty feet that more by luck than judgment brought me to the back end of the house, instead of the front.  I made my way around on the windward side of the building, hoping that the jingle of the bells might be heard as I passed the windows—­for I dared not leave the horses again, as I had done during my contest with Gowdy.  Nothing but the shelter in which they then found themselves had kept them from bolting—­that and their bewilderment.

I pulled up before the door and shouted Virginia’s name with all my might, over and over again.  But I suppose I sat there ten or fifteen minutes before Virginia came to the door; and then, while she had all her wraps on, she was in her anxiety just taking a look at the weather, debating in her mind whether to try for the safety of the fireside, or risk the stay in the schoolhouse with no fuel.  She had not heard the bells, or the trampling, or my holloing.  More by my motions than anything else, she saw that I was inviting her to get in; but she knew no more than her heels who I was.  She went back into the schoolhouse and got her dinner-basket—­lucky or providential act!—­and in she climbed.  If I had been Buck Gowdy or Asher Bushyager or the Devil himself, she would have done the same.  She would have thought, of course, that it was one of the neighbors come for her; and, anyhow, there was nothing else to do.