Page:Cornelia Meigs-The Pirate of Jasper Peak.djvu/220

 shoot. The snow was drifted over the window sills and banked against the door and still filled  the air in white clouds driven by the roaring  wind. The spring, their one water supply, was as inaccessible as though it had been ten miles  away, so they melted snow in a pot over the fire  and found it a most unsatisfactory process, since,  as Dick said, “A bucketful of snow makes about  a thimbleful of water.”

Their supply of food was quite gone by the fourth day, in spite of all their care, so there was  nothing left but the milk night and morning.

“That won’t keep one very long,” Hugh remarked.

He had been obliged to gulp down his share in the stable, being much too hungry to wait  until he got back to the house. Dick immediately followed his example and, when he had finished,  stood eying the storm through the narrow slit of  a window.

“It can’t last a great deal longer, it simply can’t,” he asserted.

Hugh, shaking down hay for Hulda, envied