“Getting ready,” said Bill, quietly.  “Have a good game?”

The old man smiled.  His bronzed face indicated extreme satisfaction.

“Not half bad, boy—­not half bad.  Relieved Lablache of five hundred dollars in the last jackpot.  Held four deuces.  He opened with full on aces.”

“Poker” John seemed to have forgotten the past heavy losses, and spoke gleefully of the paltry five hundred he had just scooped in.

The girl looked relieved, and even the undemonstrative “Lord” Bill allowed a scarcely audible sigh to escape him.  Jacky returned at once to the exigencies of the moment.

“Then, uncle, dear, let us hurry up.  I guess none of us want to be caught in a blizzard.  Say, Bill, take me to the cloak-room, right away.”

CHAPTER II

THE BLIZZARD:  ITS CONSEQUENCES

On the whole, Canada can boast of one of the most perfect health-giving climates in the world, despite the two extremes of heat and cold of which it is composed.  But even so, the Canadian climate is cursed by an evil which every now and again breaks loose from the bonds which fetter it, and rages from east to west, carrying death and destruction in its wake.  I speak of the terrible—­the raging Blizzard!

To appreciate the panic-like haste with which the Foss River Settlement party left the ballroom, one must have lived a winter in the west of Canada.  The reader who sits snugly by his or her fireside, and who has never experienced a Canadian winter, can have no conception of one of those dread storms, the very name of which had drawn words of terror from one who had lived the greater part of her life in the eastern shadow of the Rockies.  Hers was no timid, womanly fear for ordinary inclemency of weather, but a deep-rooted dread of a life-and-death struggle in a merciless storm, than which, in no part of the world, can there be found a more fearful.  Whence it comes—­and why, surely no one may say.  A meteorological expert may endeavor to account for it, but his argument is unconvincing and gains no credence from the dweller on the prairies.  And why?  Because the storm does not come from above—­neither does it come from a specified direction.  And only in the winter does such a wind blow.  The wind buffets from every direction at once.  No snow falls from above and yet a blinding gray wall of snow, swept up from the white-clothed ground, encompasses the dazed traveller.  His arm outstretched in daylight and he cannot see the tips of his heavy fur mitts.  Bitter cold, a hundred times intensified by the merciless force of the wind, and he is lost and freezing—­slowly freezing to death.

As the sleigh dashed through the outskirts of Calford, on its way to the south, there was not much doubt in the minds of any of its occupants as to the prospects of the storm.  The gusty, patchy wind, the sudden sweeps of hissing, cutting snow, as it slithered up in a gray dust in the moonlight, and lashed, with stinging force, into their faces, was a sure herald of the coming “blizzard.”