The weather did the rest.
An hour after breakfast, just when Bud was downheartedly thinking he could not much longer put off starting without betraying how hard it was going to be for him to give up the baby, the wind shifted the clouds and herded them down to the Big Mountain and held them there until they began to sift snow down upon the burdened pines.
"Gee, it's going to storm again!" Bud blustered in.

"It'll be snowing like all git-out in another hour.

I'll tell a cruel world I wouldn't take a dog out such weather as this.

Your folks may be worrying about yuh, Boy, but they ain't going to climb my carcass for packing yuh fifteen miles in a snow-storm and letting yuh freeze, maybe.

I guess the cabin's big enough to hold yuh another day--what ?" Cash lifted his eyebrows and pinched in his lips under his beard.