They rewound their mufflers, shifting the ice-patches away from their raw faces. To the far horizon all around them, there was nothing but glittering snow and the cruel wind blowing.
“Lucky so far,” Almanzo said. “Gone down only twice.”
He stepped onto his sled and started and heard Cap shout. Swinging in to follow, the buckskin had gone down.
Cap dug him out, hauled the sled around the hole, and hitched up again.
“Nothing like exercise to keep a fellow warm!” he reminded Almanzo.
From the top of the next low swell they saw the Lone Cottonwood, bare and gaunt. Snow covered the twin lakes and the low bushes that grew between them. Only the lonely tree’s bare top rose up from the endless whiteness.
As soon as he saw it, Almanzo turned westward quickly to keep well away from the sloughs around the lakes. On the upland grass the snow was solid.
The Lone Tree was the last landmark. It was soon lost again in the trackless waves of snow. There was no road, no trace nor track of any kind to be seen anywhere. No one knew where the settler lived who had raised wheat. No one was even sure that he was still in that country. It might be that he had gone out for the winter. It might be that there had never been such a man. There was only a rumor that someone had told somebody that a man living somewhere in that region had raised wheat.
One wave of the endless frozen snow-sea was like another. Beneath the snow-spray blown from their crests, the low prairie swells seemed to come on forever, all the same. The sun slowly rose higher and the cold increased.
There was no sound but the horses’ hoofs and the rasp of the sled runners that made no tracks on the ice-hard snow, and the rushing sound of the wind that faintly whistled against the sled.
From time to time Almanzo looked back and Cap shook his head. Neither of them saw any wisp of smoke against the cold sky. The small, cold sun seemed to hang motionless but it was climbing. The shadows narrowed, the waves of snow and the prairie’s curves seemed to flatten. The white wilderness leveled out, bleak and empty.
“How far we going?” Cap shouted.
“Till we find that wheat!” Almanzo called back. But he, too, was wondering whether there was any wheat in the endless emptiness. The sun was in the zenith now, the day half gone. There was still no threat in the northwestern sky, but it would be unusual to have more than this one clear day between blizzards.
Almanzo knew they should turn back toward town. Numb from cold, he stumbled off the sled and ran on beside it. He did not want to go back to the hungry town and say that he had turned back with an empty sled.
“How far you figure we’ve come?” Cap asked.
“About twenty miles,” Almanzo guessed. “Think we better go back?”
“Never give up till you’re licked!” Cap said cheerfully.
They looked around. They were on an upland. If the lower air had not been a little hazy with a glitter of blowing snow, they could have seen perhaps twenty miles. But the prairie swells, that seemed level under the high sun, hid the town to the northwest. The northwest sky was still clear.
Stamping their feet and beating their arms on their chests they searched the white land from west to east, as far south as they could see. There was not a wisp of smoke anywhere.
“Which way’ll we go?” Cap asked.
“Any way’s as good as any other,” Almanzo said. They rewound their mufflers again. Their breath had filled the mufflers with ice. They could hardly find a spot of wool to relieve the pain of ice on skin that it had chafed raw. “How are your feet?” he asked Cap.
“They don’t say,” Cap replied. “They’ll be all right, I guess. I’m going on running.”
“So am I,” Almanzo said. “If they don’t warm up pretty soon, we better stop and rub them with snow. Let’s follow this swell west a ways. If we don’t find anything that way we can circle back, farther south.”
“Suits me,” Cap agreed. Their good horses went willingly into a trot again and they ran on beside the sleds.
The upland ended sooner than they had expected. The snow field sloped downward and spread into a flat hollow that the upland had hidden. It looked like a slough. Almanzo pulled Prince to a walk and got onto the sled to look the land over. The flat hol
low ran on toward the west; he saw no way to get around it without turning back along the upland. Then he saw, ahead and across the slough, a smear of gray-brown in the snow blowing from a drift. He stopped Prince and yelled, “Hi, Cap! That look like smoke ahead there?” Cap was looking at it. “Looks like it comes out of a snowbank!” he shouted.
Almanzo drove on down the slope. After a few minutes he called back, “It’s smoke all right! There’s some kind of house there!”
They had to cross the slough to reach it. In their hurry, Cap drove alongside Almanzo and the buckskin went down. This was the deepest hole they had got a horse out of yet, and all around it the snow broke down into air-pockets under the surface till there seemed no end to their floundering. Shadows were beginning to creep eastward before they got the buckskin to solid footing and began cautiously to go on.
The thin smoke did rise from a long snowbank, and there was not a track on the snow. But when they circled and came back on the southern side, they saw that the snow had been shoveled away from before a door in the snowbank. They pulled up their sleds and shouted.
The door opened and a man stood there, astonished. His hair was long and his unshaven beard grew up to his cheekbones.