“Hev you two made up?” he said.

“No—­o!”

“Make up, then.”

“What?”

“Shake hands.”

They clasped each other’s red, benumbed fingers and laughed, albeit a little frightened at Julian.  “Go on!” he said, curtly.

They went on dazedly, stupidly, for another hour.

Suddenly Provy Smith’s keen eyes sparkled.  He pointed to a singular irregular mound of snow before them, plainly seen above the dreary level.  Julian ran to it with a cry, and began wildly digging.  “I knew I hit him,” he cried, as he brushed the snow from a huge and hairy leg.  It was the bear—­dead, but not yet cold.  He had succumbed with his huge back to the blast, the snow piling a bulwark behind him, where it had slowly roofed him in.  The half-frozen lads threw themselves fearlessly against his furry coat and crept between his legs, nestling themselves beneath his still warm body with screams of joy.  The snow they had thrown back increased the bulwark, and drifting over it, in a few moments inclosed them in a thin shell of snow.  Thoroughly exhausted, after a few grunts of satisfaction, a deep sleep fell upon them, from which they were awakened only by the pangs of hunger.  Alas! their dinners—­the school dinners—­had been left on the inglorious battlefield.  Nevertheless, they talked of eating the bear if it came to the worst.  They would have tried it even then, but they were far above the belt of timber; they had matches—­what boy has not?—­but no wood.  Still, they were reassured, and even delighted, with this prospect, and so fell asleep again, stewing with the dead bear in the half-impervious snow, and woke up in the morning ravenous, yet to see the sun shining in their faces through the melted snow, and for Jackson Tribbs to quickly discover, four miles away as the crow flies, the cabin of his father among the flaming sumacs.

They started up in the glare of the sun, which at first almost blinded them.  They then discovered that they were in a depression of the table-land that sloped before them to a deep gully in the mountainside, which again dropped into the canyon below.  The trail they had lost, they now remembered, must be near this edge.  But it was still hidden, and in seeking it there was danger of some fatal misstep in the treacherous snow.  Nevertheless, they sallied out bravely, although they would fain have stopped to skin the bear, but Julian’s mandate was peremptory.  They spread themselves along the ridge, at times scraping the loose snow away in their search for the lost trail.

Suddenly they all slipped and fell, but rose again quickly, laughing.  Then they slipped and fell again, but this time with the startling consciousness that it was not they who had slipped, but the snow!  As they regained their feet they could plainly see now that a large crack on the white field, some twenty feet in width, extended between them and the carcass of the bear, showing the glistening rock below.  Again they were thrown down with a sharp shock.  Jackson Tribbs, who had been showing a strange excitement, suddenly gave a cry of warning.  “Lie flat, fellers! but keep a-crawlin’ and jumpin’.  We’re goin’ down a slide!” And the next moment they were sliding and tossing, apparently with the whole snow-field, down towards the gullied precipice.