Corliss and Bishop laid hold of Bill and started off to McPherson’s, and Jacob Welse and the baron were just sliding his mate over the eaves, when a huge block of ice rammed in and smote the cabin squarely.  Frona saw it, and cried a warning, but the tiered logs were overthrown like a house of cards.  She saw Courbertin and the sick man hurled clear of the wreckage, and her father go down with it.  She sprang to the spot, but he did not rise.  She pulled at him to get his mouth above water, but at full stretch his head, barely showed.  Then she let go and felt about with her hands till she found his right arm jammed between the logs.  These she could not move, but she thrust between them one of the roof-poles which had underlaid the dirt and moss.  It was a rude handspike and hardly equal to the work, for when she threw her weight upon the free end it bent and crackled.  Heedful of the warning, she came in a couple of feet and swung upon it tentatively and carefully till something gave and Jacob Welse shoved his muddy face into the air.

He drew half a dozen great breaths, and burst out, “But that tastes good!” And then, throwing a quick glance about him, Frona, Del Bishop is a most veracious man.”

“Why?” she asked, perplexedly.

“Because he said you’d do, you know.”

He kissed her, and they both spat the mud from their lips, laughing.  Courbertin floundered round a corner of the wreckage.

“Never was there such a man!” he cried, gleefully.  “He is mad, crazy!  There is no appeasement.  His skull is cracked by the fall, and his tobacco is gone.  It is chiefly the tobacco which is lamentable.”

But his skull was not cracked, for it was merely a slit of the scalp of five inches or so.

“You’ll have to wait till the others come back.  I can’t carry.”  Jacob Welse pointed to his right arm, which hung dead.  “Only wrenched,” he explained.  “No bones broken.”

The baron struck an extravagant attitude and pointed down at Frona’s foot.  “Ah! the water, it is gone, and there, a jewel of the flood, a pearl of price!”

Her well-worn moccasins had gone rotten from the soaking, and a little white toe peeped out at the world of slime.

“Then I am indeed wealthy, baron; for I have nine others.”

“And who shall deny? who shall deny?” he cried, fervently.

“What a ridiculous, foolish, lovable fellow it is!”

“I kiss your hand.”  And he knelt gallantly in the muck.

She jerked her hand away, and, burying it with its mate in his curly mop, shook his head back and forth.  “What shall I do with him, father?”

Jacob Welse shrugged his shoulders and laughed; and she turned Courbertin’s face up and kissed him on the lips.  And Jacob Welse knew that his was the larger share in that manifest joy.