The sky was heavy overhead, and the wind had died out.

It was the beginning of the brief lull which came in the second day of the Great Storm.
McKay laughed softly as he sensed the odds against them.
"We'll be having the storm at our heels again before long, Pied-Bot," he said.

"We'd better make for the timber a dozen miles south." He struck out, circling the dune, so that he was traveling straight away from the first hole he had cut through the shell of the drift.

From that door, made by the outlaw who had saved them, Josephine Tavish watched the shadowy forms of man and dog until they were lost in the gray-white chaos of a frozen world..