Still, that was a small relief, and temporary.  Until the next day they were hopeful, and the physical discomfort of staying in that crude little cabin with a lot of ungrammatical, roughly clad men, and of having no maid to serve her and not even the comfort of privacy, loomed large in the mind of Mrs. Singleton Corey.  Never before in her life had she drunk coffee with condensed cream in it, or eaten burned bread with stale butter, and boiled beans and bacon.  Never before had she shared the bed of another woman, or slept in a borrowed nightgown that was too tight in the arms.  To Mrs. Singleton Corey these things bore all the earmarks of tragedy.

But the next day real tragedy pushed small discomforts back into their proper perspective.  It still stormed, though not so furiously, and with fitful spells of sunlight breaking through the churning clouds.  The men left the cabin at daylight, and Mrs. Singleton Corey found herself practically compelled to wash the dishes and sweep the floor and wait on the distracted Kate who was crushed under the realization of Mrs. Singleton Corey’s disgust at her surroundings.  Conversation languished that day.  Mrs. Singleton Corey sat in a straight-backed chair and stared out of the window that faced the little basin, and waited for Jack to come.  She had suffered much, and she felt that fate owed her a speedy return of the prodigal.

Instead of that they brought Hank Brown to the cabin, dead on a makeshift stretcher.  When the shock of that had passed a little, so that her mind could digest details, Mrs. Singleton Corey learned, with a terrible, vise-like contraction of the heart, that Hank had climbed ahead of the others and had almost reached the place they called Taylor Rock, where Jack was said to have his cave.  Those below had heard a rifle shot, and they had climbed up to find Hank stretched dead in the snow.  Two men had searched the vicinity as well as they could, but they had found nothing at all.  The snow, they said, was drifted twenty feet deep in some places.

They did not tell her what they thought about it, but Mrs. Singleton Corey knew.  And Kate knew.  And the two women’s eyes would not meet, after that, and their voices were constrained, their words formal when they found it necessary to have speech with each other.

Mrs. Singleton Corey forgot the crudities and the discomforts of Toll-Gate cabin after that.  She watched the trail, and her eyes questioned dumbly every man that came in for rest and food before going out again to the search.  They always went again, fighting their way through the storm that never quite cleared.  They went forth, with a dogged persistence and a courage that made Mrs. Singleton Corey marvel in spite of her absorption in her own anxiety.