“Straight ahead,” answered the boy beside him, confidently.  “I’ve been over this road a thousand times, and it doesn’t bend to the right for half a mile yet.”

“It’s lucky you know,” said the driver.  “I’m all at sea already.  Can’t see the fences only now and then.  I’d ha’ swung off there, sure, if you hadn’t said not.”

As the rising wind began to whirl snowily about their ears and necks, the party turned up their coat-collars and tucked in their fur robes.  The horses were plowing with increasing difficulty through the heavily drifted roads, and more than once their driver found himself obliged to make a long detour around a drift which had not been in the road when they first came over it.  Moreover, in spite of the snow, the air seemed to have grown colder and to be acquiring a penetrating, icy quality which at last made Jeff declare to Evelyn: 

“You may say you’re not cold, but I’m going to insist on your letting me wrap this steamer rug found your shoulders, with the corner over your head, so.  Now doesn’t that keep off a lot of wind?”

“Indeed it does, thank you,” admitted Evelyn, with a little shiver she could not quite conceal.

“You are cold!” Jeff said, anxiously.

“No colder than anybody else.  Please don’t worry about me.”

But he did worry, and with reason.  Indeed, although nobody was willing yet to admit it, the situation was becoming a little unpleasant.  In spite of the stout confidence of the boy on the seat with the driver, others who were somewhat familiar with the road were beginning to question his leading.

“That clump of trees doesn’t look natural just there,” said one, standing up in the sleigh and trying to peer through the wall of snowflakes.  “It’s too near.  It ought to be a hundred feet away.”

“No.  You’re thinking we’re farther back than We are,” declared Neil Ward, from the front seat.  “We’re almost at the turn by the railroad.”

“Why, we can’t be!  We haven’t passed the Winters farm.  I tell you, you’re off the road.”

“I think we are,” agreed the driver, uneasily, pulling his cap farther over his snow-hung eyebrows.  “I’ve been thinking so for quite a spell.”

“We’re all right.  You people just keep cool!” cried Neil.

“No trouble about keeping cool in this blizzard!” growled somebody, and there was a general laugh.

One of the girls started a song, and they all joined cheerily in.  A proposition to toot the horns, forgotten in the bottom of the sleigh, with a hope of attracting attention from some one, was adopted, and a hideous din followed, and was kept up till every one was weary—­with no result.

All at once, without warning, the horses plunged heavily and solidly to their steaming shoulders into an undreamed-of ditch, and the sleigh stopped, well into the same hole.

“Will you admit now that we’re off the road, Neil Ward?” cried some one, fiercely; and Neil, without contention but with evident chagrin, admitted it.  There was no ditch that he was aware of within a mile of the highway.