“Come,” cried Franklin once more.  “Let’s get to the mouth of the coulee.  I know this place perfectly.”

And so, advancing and calling, and waiting while Sam fought the stubborn horses with lash and rein out of the shelter which they coveted.  Franklin led out of the flat coulee, into the wider draw, and edged up and up to the right, agonizedly repeating to himself, over and over again, the instructions he had laid down, and which the dizzy whirl of the snow mingled ever confusedly in his mind.  At last they had the full gale again in their faces as they reached the level of the prairies, and cast loose for what they thought was west, fearfully, tremblingly, the voyage a quarter of a mile, the danger infinitely great; for beyond lay only the cruel plains and the bitter storm—­this double norther of a woeful Christmastide.

Once again Providence aided them, by agency of brute instinct.  One of the horses threw up its head and neighed, and then both pressed forward eagerly.  The low moan of penned cattle came down the wind.  They crashed into a fence of lath.  They passed its end—­a broken, rattling end, that trailed and swept back and forth in the wind.

“It’s the chicken corral,” cried Sam, “an’ it’s down!  They’ve been burnin’—­”

“Go on! go on—­hurry!” shouted Franklin, bending down his head so that the gale might not quite rob him of his breath, and Sam urged on the now willing horses.

They came to the sod barn, and here they left the team that had saved them, not pausing to take them from the harness.  They crept to the low and white-banked wall in which showed two windows, glazed with frost.  They could not see the chimney plainly, but it carried no smell of smoke.  The stairway leading down to the door of the dugout was missing, the excavation which held it was drifted full of snow, and the snow bore no track of human foot.  All was white and silent.  It might have been a vault far in the frozen northern sea.

Franklin burst open the door, and they both went in, half pausing.  There was that which might well give them pause.  The icy breath of the outer air was also here.  Heaps and tongues of snow lay across the floor.  White ashes lay at the doors of both the stoves.  The table was gone, the chairs were gone.  The interior was nearly denuded, so that the abode lay like an abandoned house, drifted half full of dry, fine powdered snow.  And even this snow upon the floors had no tracks upon its surface.  There was no sign of life.

Awed, appalled, the two men stood, white and huge, in the middle of the abandoned room, listening for that which they scarce expected to hear.  Yet from one of the side rooms they caught a moan, a call, a supplication.  Then from a door came a tall and white-faced figure with staring eyes, which held out its arms to the taller of the snow-shrouded forms and said:  “Uncle, is it you?  Have you come back?  We were so afraid!” From the room behind this figure came a voice sobbing, shouting, blessing the name of the Lord.  So they knew that two were saved, and one was missing.