ears. His countenance became so pale with grief and chagrin that he seemed about to drop from his saddle. He laid the reins on his horse’s neck, and raised both arms above his head in a gesture of despair, but he said no word. The soldier, after waiting vainly for a question or an answer, spoke again.

“We have no time to lose, sir; we must cross this plain before night. I have some forage here and something in my haversack, and if we can get a fire we can live.”

St. Arnaud, still silent, mechanically gathered up the reins again, and the horse instinctively made for a faint track beaten through the snow. The soldier followed, ten paces behind. On they [Pg 7]travelled for an hour or two. As the sickly sun sank below the fringe of dun clouds in the west the cold became more terrible. A fierce wind set in, which drifted furious flurries of snow across the vast, white plain; and when the sky showed black against the white earth, neither man nor horse could travel farther. There was not a tree or even a bush in sight. They had passed a few dead horses on the dreary waste, but that was the only thing that broke the ghastly monotony of the way. Now they involuntarily halted, and each knew that from then until sunrise they would be fighting with the cold for life. The thought came back to St. Arnaud, who had scarcely spoken a word to his companion, how calamity levels all distinctions. It would not have surprised him in the least if, when he dismounted, and mechanically threw the reins to the soldier, to have heard him say: “Take care of your own horse, and I will attend to mine.” Instead of this, the soldier only pointed to a little hillock near by, and said: “That place, sir, is a little sheltered from the wind. It will do us good to walk there.”

[Pg 7]

St. Arnaud, whose faculties seemed frozen, obeyed the soldier. As he was tramping through the half darkness, his eyes blinded by the snow, [Pg 8]and the icy blast nearly cutting him to pieces, he heard a shout of joy behind him. The soldier had suddenly stumbled upon something which was worth to them at that moment all the gold in the Bank of France. It was nothing less than a broken gun-carriage, of which a few inches of the wheel appeared above the snow. The soldier dashed toward it, and tugged and pulled at it, shouting out exclamations of joy, as a man will who has found that which will give him life. St. Arnaud watched him dully as he wrenched such of it apart as he could, and dragging it to the sheltered spot under the hillock, where St. Arnaud held the trembling horses, scooped out a hole in the snow, and with a 

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