“If you don’t care, I do.  And I am going to pull you through with me, if for no other reason simply because I have set out to do it, and am not going to lie down on the job.  What’s more, you’ve got to do your share.  I have built the fire; will you get up?”

“No,” she flashed out at him, thoroughly awake now.  “I won’t!”

He stooped, caught the corner of her blankets, and whipped them off.  Instinctively, she sought to draw the under-bedding over her, forgetting that she had not undressed.

“You brute!” she screamed at him.

“Get up,” he told her sternly, “or, by heaven, I’ll make you!”

She saw his face plainly now as his crackling fire burned higher.  It was hard, his eyes were ominous.  She hesitated and saw in his eyes and in a stir of his body that he was going to jerk her to her feet.  She flung out of bed at that and upon the far side from him.

“Get your boots on,” he ordered.  “I don’t want you catching cold from idiotic carelessness, and I won’t have you going sick on my hands.  For the first and last time I’ll admit that I don’t enjoy driving you like a cursed galley-slave.  But I’ll do it, and do a thorough job of it, if you force me to it.”

She drew on her boots hastily and came to the fire and laced them.  He was a new man this morning and relentless.  She was afraid of him after a new, bewildered fashion.

“I never saw a storm worse than this,” he told her.  He had cooked the breakfast because he was in a hurry, and did not care to trust her wasteful fingers with their already precious food.  “There must be two or three feet on the level places by now; ploughing through snow like that is killing work for a man, and you wouldn’t last at it ten minutes.”  He had no intention of speaking contemptuously; she knew that his thought was not trifling with such matters as her feelings.  He was merely indulging in plain talk.  “We have enough food for a few days.  After that, if we stuck on here and did not find more somehow, we’d die like dogs.  Therefore we are going to get ready to beat it out the first chance we get.”

“But if I wouldn’t last ten minutes, as you so elegantly put it?”

“Not as you are; not as the snow is.  But I’m hoping that before it’s too late we’ll get clear weather, a sun, a thaw, and freezing nights.  Then we could tackle it on the crust.  And your job now is to get yourself ready for that one chance.”

Her anger at the indignity already done her whipped out the sarcasm: 

“By getting ready, I suppose you mean for me to pack my trunk and order the expressman at the door?”

He looked at her with a long, impersonal stare which bewildered her; she was at utter loss to read its meaning until he spoke: 

“You are to pack what endurance you’ve got into your muscles.  You are to make up your mind to call up all of the grit that’s in you.  You’ll need both.  And you are to quit lying around and getting weaker every day; you’ve got little enough time to harden yourself, so you are going to take on the job right now.”