The cove was full of warmth and light and he basked in it.
Pennington and Warner fell asleep, but Dick lay a while in a happy, dreaming state.

He felt as he looked up at the cloudy sky and driving snow that, after all, there was something wild in every man that no amount of civilization could drive out.

An ordinary bed and an ordinary roof would be just as warm and better sheltered, but they seldom gave him the same sense of physical pleasure that he felt as he lay there with the storm driving by.
His dreamy state deepened, and with it the wilderness effect which the little valley, the high mountains around it and the raging winter made.
His mind traveled far back once more and he easily imagined himself his great ancestor, Paul Cotter, sleeping in the woods with his comrades and hidden from Indian attack.

While the feeling was still strong upon him he too fell asleep, and he did not awaken until it was time for him to take the watch with Pennington and Warner.
It was then about two o'clock in the morning, and the snow had ceased to fall, but it lay deep in all places not sheltered, while the wind had heaped it up many feet in all the gorges and ravines of the mountains.
Dick thought he had never beheld a more majestic world.

All the clouds were gone and hosts of stars glittered in a sky of brilliant blue.
On every side of them rose the lofty peaks and ridges, clothed in gleaming white, the forests themselves a vast, white tracery.