The storm was, if possible, more furious. The snow flew thicker; it stung more sharply, and seemed to come from every direction.
"We'll stand right here behind the horse till it quits," he said. "It can't keep up a lick like this."
But turning about, in an effort to face the animal away from the worst of the blizzard, he kicked a clump of sage brush arched fairly over by its burden of snow. Instantly a startled rabbit leaped from beneath the shrub and bounded against the horse's legs, and then away in the storm. In affright the horse jerked madly backward. The bridle was broken. It held for a second, then tore away from the animal's head and fell in a heap in the snow.
"Whoa, boy!--whoa!" said the miner, in a quiet way, but the horse, in his terror, snorted at the brush and galloped away, to be lost from sight on the instant.
For a moment the miner, with his bundled little burden in his arms, started in pursuit of the bronco. But even the animal's tracks in the snow were being already effaced by the sweep of the powdery gale. The utter futility of searching for anything was harshly thrust upon the miner's senses.
They were lost in that valley of snow, cold, and blizzard.
"We'll have to make a shelter the best we can," he said, "and wait here, maybe half an hour, till the storm has quit."
He kicked the snow from a cluster of sagebrush shrubs, and behind this flimsy barrier presently crouched, with the shivering pup, and with the silent little foundling in his arms.
What hours that merciless blizzard raged, no annals of Nevada tell. What struggles the gray old miner made to find his way homeward before its wrath, what a fight it was he waged against the elements till night came on and the worst of the storm had ceased, could never be known in Borealis.
But early that night the teamster, Lufkins, was startled by the neighing of a horse, and when he came to the stable, there was the half-blinded animal on which old Jim and tiny Skeezucks had ridden away in the morning--the empty saddle still upon his back.
The great stout ore-wagons stood in the snow that lay on the Borealis street, with never a horse or a mule to keep them company. Not an animal fit to bear a man had been left in the camp. But the twenty men who rode far off in the white desolation out beyond were losing hope as they searched and searched in the drifts and mounds that lay so deep upon the earth.