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Many usual events had occurred in the lives of the wandering Ichabod and Camilla, which had been forgotten; but the memory of that day, the overwhelming, incontestible knowledge of the impotency of wee, restless, inconsequent man, they were never to forget.

“Tiny, tiny, mortal!” laughed the storm. “To think you would combat Nature, would defy her, the power of which I am but one of many, many manifestations!” And it laughed again. The two prisoners, listening, their ears to the tunnel, heard the sound, and felt to the full its biting mockery.

Next day the siege was raised, and the sun smiled as only the sun can smile upon miles and miles of dazzling snow crystals. Ichabod climbed out–by way of the window route–and worked for hours with a shovel before he had a channel from the tiny, submerged shanty to the light of day beyond. Then together he and Camilla stood side by side in the doorway, as they had done so many times before, looking about them at the boundless prairie, drifted in waves of snow like the sea: the wonder of it all, ever new, creeping over them.

“What a country!” voiced Camilla.

“What a country, indeed,” echoed Ichabod.

“Lonely and mysterious as Death.”

“Yes, as Death or–Life.”

CHAPTER IV–A REVELATION

Time, unchanging automaton, moved on until late spring. Paradox of nature, the warm brown tints of chilly days gave place under the heat of slanting suns to the cool green of summer. All at once, sudden as though autochthonal, there appeared meadow-larks and blackbirds: dead weeds or man-erected posts serving in lieu of trees as vantage points from which to sing. Ground squirrels whistled cheerily from newly broken fields and roadways. Coveys of quail, tame as barn-yard fowls, played about the beaten paths, and ran pattering in the dust ahead of each passing team. Again, from its winter’s rest, lonely, uncertain as to distance, came the low, booming call of the prairie rooster. Nature had awakened, and the joy of that awakening was upon the land.

Of a morning in May the faded, dust-covered day-coach drew in at the tiny prairie village. A little man alighted. He stood a moment on the platform, his hands deep in his pockets, a big black cigar between his teeth, and looked out over the town. The coloring of the short straggling street was more weather-stained than a year ago, yet still very new, and the newcomer smiled as he looked; a big broad smile that played about his lips, turning up the corners of his brown moustache, showing a flash of white teeth, and lighting a pair of big blue eyes which lay, like a woman’s, beneath heavy lashes. In youth, that smile would have been a grin; but it was no grin now. The man was far from youth, and about the mouth and eyes were deep lines, which told of one who knew of the world.

Slowly the smile disappeared, and as it faded the little man puffed harder at the cigar. Evidently something he particularly wished to explain would not become clear to his mind.

“Of all places,” he soliloquized, “to have chosen–this!”

He started up the street, over the irregular warping sidewalk.

“Hotel, sir-r?” The formula was American, the trilling r’s distinctly German.

The traveller turned at the sound, to make acquaintance with Hans Becher; for it was Hans Becher, very much metamorphosed from the retiring German of a year ago. He made the train regularly now.

The small man nodded and held out his grip; together they walked up the street. In front of the hotel they stopped, and the stranger pulled out his watch.

“Is there a livery here?” he asked.

“Yes; at the street end–the side to the left hand.”

“Thanks. I’ll be back with you this evening.”

Hans Becher stared, open-mouthed, as the man moved off.

“You will not to dinner return?”

The little man stopped, and smiled without apparent reason.

“No. Keep the grip. I expect to lunch,” again he smiled without provocation, “elsewhere. By the way,” he added, as an afterthought, “can you tell me where Mr. Maurice–Ichabod Maurice–lives?”