It caught us, that wave of damp and darkness, and rolled over us and crushed us down as we cowered.  I caught up the blanket from the ground and pulled it around the girl’s shoulders.  I drew her tight to me as I lay with my own back to the storm, and pulled the saddle over her head, with this and my own body keeping out the tempest from her as much as I could.  There was no other fence for her, and but for this she might perhaps have died; I do not know.  I felt her strain at my arms first, then settle back and sink her head under the saddle flap and cower close like some little schoolfellow, all the curves of her body craving shelter, comfort, warmth.  She shivered terribly.  I heard her gasp and sob.  Ah, how I pitied her that hour!

[Illustration:  COLONEL MERIWEATHER EXPRESSES HIS THANKS FOR THE RESCUE OF HIS DAUGHTER]

[Illustration:  ORME TESTIFIES THAT HE HEARD JOHN AND THE COLONEL QUARRELING]

Our fire was gone at the first sweep of the storm, which raged thunderously by, with heavy feet, over the echoing floor of the world.  There came other fires, such blazes and explosions of pale balls of electricity as I had never dreamed might be, with these detonations of pent-up elemental wrath such as I never conceived might have existence under any sky.  Night, death, storm, the strength of the elements, all the primeval factors of the world and life were upon us, testing us, seeking to destroy us, beating upon us, freezing, choking, blinding us, leaving us scarce animate.

Yet not destroying us.  Still, somewhere under the huddle and draggle of it all burned on the human soul.  The steel in my belt was cold, but it had held its fire.  The ice in the flints about us held fire also in its depths.  Fire was in our bodies, the fire of life—­indomitable, yearning—­in our two bodies.  So that which made the storm test us and try us and seek to slay us, must perhaps have smiled grimly as it howled on and at length disappeared, baffled by the final success of the immutable and imperishable scheme.  The fire in our two bodies still was there.

As the rain lessened, and the cold increased, I knew that rigors would soon come upon us.  “We must walk,” I said.  “You shiver, you freeze.”

“You tremble,” she said.  “You are cold.  You are very cold.”

“Walk, or we die,” I gasped; and so I led her at last lower down the side of the ravine, where the wind was not so strong.

“We must run,” I said, “or we shall die.”  I staggered as I ran.  With all my soul I challenged my weakness, summoning to my aid that reserve of strength I had always known each hour in my life.  Strangely I felt—­how I cannot explain—­that she must be saved, that she was I. Strange phrases ran through my brain.  I remembered only one, “Cleaving only unto her”; and this, in my weakened frame of body and mind, I could not separate from my stern prayer to my own strength, once so ready, now so strangely departed from me.