The top of the sagebrush made black dots on the white surface, and there were comparatively bare places where she dared sit down and rest a few moments, but mostly it was drifts now--drifts where she floundered and the sheep sunk down and stood stupidly until pushed forward by those behind them.
Twelve o'clock came and there was no change save that the drifts were higher and she could see a little farther into the white wilderness.
"What if--what if--" she gulped, for the thought brought a contraction of the throat muscles that made swallowing difficult. "What if there were twenty-four more of it!" Could she stand it? She was tired to exhaustion with walking, with the strain of resisting the cold, and the all-night vigil--weak, too, with hunger.
Was she to become another of those that the first chinook uncovered? One of the already large army that have paid with their lives in just such circumstances for their loyalty, or their bad judgment? After all she had gone through to reach the goal she had set for herself was she to go out like this--like a common herder who had no thought or ambition beyond the debauch when he drew his wages?
When the dimming light told her the afternoon was waning, and then indications of darkness and another night of torture, despair filled her. Numb, hungry, her vitality at low ebb, she doubted her ability to weather it. Was she being punished, she wondered, for protesting against the life the Fates appeared to have mapped out for her? Was this futile inane end coming to her because since that day when she had stood looking down upon Prouty and vowed to succeed she had fought and struggled and struck back, instead of meekly acknowledging herself crushed and beaten? Had she shaken her fist at the Almighty in so doing, when she should have bowed her head and folded her hands in resignation? She did not know; in her despair and bewilderment she lost all logic, all perspective; she knew only that in spite of the exhaustion of her body her spirit was still defiant and protesting.
She spread out her hands in supplication, raising her face to the pitiless sky while needlelike particles stung her eyeballs, and she cried despairingly: "Oh, Uncle Joe, where are you? Is this the end of me--Katie Prentice? Is this all I was born for--just to live through heartaches and hardships, and then to drop down and die like an animal without knowing happiness or success or anything I've worked and longed and prayed for? Oh, Uncle Joe, where are you?"
The wail that the wind carried over the desert was plaintive, minor, like the cry that had reached him when she sought him in the darkness in that other crisis. She herself thought of it, but then he had responded promptly, and with the sound of his voice there had come a sense of safety and security.