For a long while he kept going rigid with fear, but he sank into misery, too cold and deaf to feel anything except a slow desire to vomit as the car lurched. Probably he slept — at least, he awakened, and awakened to a sensation of pushing the car anxiously up hill, as she bucked and stuttered in the effort to make a slippery rise. Suppose the engine died — suppose the brakes would not hold and they slid back downhill, reeling, bursting off the road and down — A great many suppositions tortured him, hour by hour.
Then he tried being awake and bright and helpful. He noticed that the ice-lined windshield, illuminated from the light on the snow ahead, was a sheet of diamonds. He noticed it, but he couldn’t get himself to think much of diamonds, even in sheets.
He tried conversation.
“Cheer up. Breakfast at dawn — across the border!” he tried on Sissy.
“Breakfast!” she said bitterly.
And they crunched on, in that moving coffin with only the sheet of diamonds and Buck’s silhouette alive in all the world.
After unnumbered hours the car reared and tumbled and reared again. The motor raced; its sound rose to an intolerable roaring; yet the car seemed not to be moving. The motor stopped abruptly. Buck cursed, popped his head back into the car like a turtle, and the starter ground long and whiningly. The motor again roared, again stopped. They could hear stiff branches rattling, hear Foolish moaning in sleep. The car was a storm-menaced cabin in the wilderness. The silence seemed waiting, as they were waiting.
“Strouble?” said Doremus.
