“What say ye, Jamie?” he asked of MacGeorge.

“Come ye or bide ye, I go on,” answered the stern old soldier.  “I can carry the bags mysel’.”

“Then that settles the maitter.  If ye gang, I gang.”

So the horses were turned adrift to find their own way home, and the two men went off into the mirk, carrying the bags; whilst Marchbanks, on their urgent advice, turned to force his arduous way back to Moffat.

Snow still fell in the morning, but the worst of the storm seemed over when Marchbanks again started to try for Tweedshaws to ascertain if MacGeorge and Goodfellow had won their way through.  The country was one vast drift; the snow-posts by the roadside, where not altogether buried or so plastered with the driving snow on their weather side as to be invisible, pushed their black heads through the universal ghostly shroud; where the road had been, the abandoned coach itself loomed, a shapeless white mound.  On and on Marchbanks toiled, and, far past the spot where last night he had parted from his comrades, something unusual hanging to a snow post caught his eye.  It was the mail-bags, securely tied there by hands which too evidently had been bleeding from the cold; but of guard or coachman there was never a sign.  The meagre winter day was already drawing to a close; with the gathering darkness a rising wind drove the snow once more before it, and the clouds to windward piled black and ominous.  By himself Marchbanks was powerless to help, if help were indeed yet possible; he could but return to Moffat and give the alarm.

That night men with lanterns and snow-poles fought their way to Tweedshaws, only to learn there what all had feared—­neither guard nor coachman had come through.  Therefore, if by remote chance they still lived, the men must lie buried in the snow, perhaps within very few yards of the high-road.  For two days scores of men searched every likely spot, but never a clue they found, except Goodfellow’s hat, which lay in a peat-hag at no great distance from the post where the mail-bags had been hung.

Then—­some said it was a dream that guided them—­some one thought of an old, disused road along which there was possibility the lost men might have made their way.  There, from a drift protruded something black—­a boot; and on his back, deep buried, lay Goodfellow.  Near at hand they found MacGeorge, in an easy attitude, as if quietly sleeping, on his face a smile—­“a kind o’ a pleasure,” the finders called it—­such a smile, perhaps, as the face of the “good and faithful servant” may wear when he entereth into the joy of his Lord.