Meanwhile the shovel had struck on a layer of stones, the remains of some past landslip, since buried under flowering earth.  With its turned-back edge, it was hard to insert it below them, and again and again it came up having raised nothing but a little gravel; but the old man worked on still with his docile, child-like look, intent upon his task.  Presently the infirm handle came off, and the shovel dropped into the bottom of the hole.  At the same moment, with a wilder shriek and a fiercer on-rush, the fury came tearing again along the mountain side; the whole of the trees that yet remained in the patch of forest nearest to the cottage were swept away at once, and the slope was left bare.  The old man crouched down in his hole, with his anxious eye fixed on the four walls within which the baby was sheltered; they still stood, the only object which the demon had not yet swept from his path.  And even as the old man looked, he saw the upper part of the back wall begin to loosen, to totter, and give way.  The baby was in the front room, but was under the windward wall.  In the teeth of the gale the old man crawled out of the hole, extended his length on the ground, and began to drag his stiff and trembling frame, with hands, elbows and knees, across the fifty feet or so of barren soil that lay between the hole and the cottage.  He heard the crash of bricks before he had accomplished half the distance; without pausing to look he crawled rapidly on till he crossed the threshold, and saw the babe still sleeping safely in its wooden cradle.  There were two large iron dogs in the grate; he drew them out and placed them—­panting painfully with the effort, for they were almost beyond his strength to lift—­in the cradle, under the little mattress, one at each end.  The baby, disturbed in its slumber, stretched its little limbs, smiled at him, and went to sleep again.  He doubled a sack over the coverlet, tied a rope round the cradle, fastened it by a slip-knot underneath, pulled out the end at the back, and tightened it till it dragged against the hood.  The cradle went on its wheels well enough to the door.  Then the old man summoned his remaining strength, and having knotted the rope round his waist, threw himself on the ground again, and emerged with his precious charge into the roaring hurricane.  Across the barren mountain slope, far above the ken of any fellow-being, in the teeth of death, the old man crept with the sleeping babe.  Another threatening of the deluge of rain, which would surely accompany the tornado, added to the misery of the painful journey; the sudden downpour of heavy drops drenched the grandfather to the skin, but the grandchild was protected under the sacking.