The barrack, he knew, lay diagonally across the wide meadow, and near the adjoining woods.
Five minutes of tramping through the snow ought to bring him to it.

And he set off, diagonally.
But, before he had gone a hundred yards, he lost his first zest in the adventure.

The darkness had thickened; and the vagrant wind-gusts had tightened into a steady gale; a gale which carried before it a blinding wrack of stingingly hard-driven snow.
The gray of the dying dusk was blotted out.

The wind smote and battered the spindling child.

Mechanically, he kept on for five or six minutes, making scant and irregular progress.