“Such happiness is not for me,” he muttered under his breath; and then aloud he added:  “No, no, I’ve got to go now while I have the courage, I mean.”  He broke off as suddenly as he had begun, and taking her face in his hands he kissed her good-bye.

Now, accustomed as was the Girl to the strange comings and goings of the men at the camp, it did not occur to her to question him further when he told her that he should have been away before now.  Moreover, she trusted and loved him.  And so it was without the slightest feeling of misgiving that she watched her lover quickly take down his coat and hat from the peg on the wall and start for the door.  On the other hand, it must have required not a little courage on the man’s part to have torn himself away from this lovely, if unconventional, creature, just as he was beginning to love truly and appreciate her.  But, then, Johnson was a man of no mean determination!

Not daring to trust himself to words, Johnson paused to look back over his shoulder at the Girl before plunging forth into the night.  But on opening the door all the multitudinous wild noises of the forests reached his ears:  Sounds of whispering and rocking storm-tossed pines, sounds of the wind making the rounds of the deep canyon below them, sounds that would have made the blood run cold of a man more daring, even, than himself.  Like one petrified he stood blinded, almost, by the great drifts of snow that were being driven into the room, while the cabin rocked and shook and the roof cracked and snapped, the lights flickered, smoked, or sent their tongues of fire upward towards the ceiling, the curtains swayed like pendants in the air, and while baskets, boxes, and other small furnishings of the cabin were blown in every direction.

But it was the Girl’s quick presence of mind that saved them from being buried, literally, under the snow.  In an instant she had rushed past him and closed both the outer and inner doors of the cabin; then, going over to the window, she tried to look through the heavily frosted panes; but the falling of the sleet and snow, striking the window like fine shot, made it impossible for her to see more than a few inches away.

“Why, it’s the first time I knew that it—­” She cut her sentence short and ended with:  “That’s the way we git it up here!  Look!  Look!”

Whereupon, Johnson went over to the window and put his face close to hers on the frosted panes; a great sea of white snow met his gaze!

“This means—­” he said, turning away from the window and meeting her glance—­“surely it doesn’t mean that I can’t leave Cloudy to-night?”

“It means you can’t get off the mountain to-night,” calmly answered the Girl.

“Good Lord!” fell from the man’s lips.

“You can’t leave this room to-night,” went on the Girl, decidedly.  “Why, you couldn’t find your way three feet from this door—­you a stranger!  You don’t know the trail anyway unless you can see it.”