The spruces swathed them in blackness and silence.  They might have been in their coffins underground.  He said to himself:  “Perhaps it’ll feel like this...” and then again:  “After this I sha’n’t feel anything...”

Suddenly he heard the old sorrel whinny across the road, and thought:  “He’s wondering why he doesn’t get his supper...”

“Come!” Mattie whispered, tugging at his hand.

Her sombre violence constrained him:  she seemed the embodied instrument of fate.  He pulled the sled out, blinking like a night-bird as he passed from the shade of the spruces into the transparent dusk of the open.  The slope below them was deserted.  All Starkfield was at supper, and not a figure crossed the open space before the church.  The sky, swollen with the clouds that announce a thaw, hung as low as before a summer storm.  He strained his eyes through the dimness, and they seemed less keen, less capable than usual.

He took his seat on the sled and Mattie instantly placed herself in front of him.  Her hat had fallen into the snow and his lips were in her hair.  He stretched out his legs, drove his heels into the road to keep the sled from slipping forward, and bent her head back between his hands.  Then suddenly he sprang up again.

“Get up,” he ordered her.

It was the tone she always heeded, but she cowered down in her seat, repeating vehemently:  “No, no, no!”

“Get up!”

“Why?”

“I want to sit in front.”

“No, no!  How can you steer in front?”

“I don’t have to.  We’ll follow the track.”

They spoke in smothered whispers, as though the night were listening.

“Get up!  Get up!” he urged her; but she kept on repeating:  “Why do you want to sit in front?”

“Because I-because I want to feel you holding me,” he stammered, and dragged her to her feet.

The answer seemed to satisfy her, or else she yielded to the power of his voice.  He bent down, feeling in the obscurity for the glassy slide worn by preceding coasters, and placed the runners carefully between its edges.  She waited while he seated himself with crossed legs in the front of the sled; then she crouched quickly down at his back and clasped her arms about him.  Her breath in his neck set him shuddering again, and he almost sprang from his seat.  But in a flash he remembered the alternative.  She was right:  this was better than parting.  He leaned back and drew her mouth to his...

Just as they started he heard the sorrel’s whinny again, and the familiar wistful call, and all the confused images it brought with it, went with him down the first reach of the road.  Half-way down there was a sudden drop, then a rise, and after that another long delirious descent.  As they took wing for this it seemed to him that they were flying indeed, flying far up into the cloudy night, with Starkfield immeasurably below them, falling away like a speck in space...  Then the big elm shot up ahead, lying in wait for them at the bend of the road, and he said between his teeth:  “We can fetch it; I know we can fetch it-”