Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/178

 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.

She stood motionless thinking of it, the snow beating into her upturned face, the wind whipping her skirts about her. Then a feeling of exultation came to her—an exultation that was of the mind and spirit, so tangible that it sent over her a glow that was physical, creeping like a slow warm tide from her toes to the tips of her numb fingers. Even as she marveled it vanished—a curious trick of the imagination she regarded it—but it left her with a feeling of courage; inexplicably it had roused her will to a determination to fight for her life with the last ounce of her strength, and so long as there was a heart beat In her body.

The time came, however, when this moment of transport and resolution seemed so long ago that It was like some misty Incident of her childhood. Her body, as when a jaded horse lashed to a gallop reaches a stage where it drops to a walk from which no amount of punishment can rouse it, was refusing to respond to the spur of her