The following morning.
The blizzard that had raged all night had finally spent itself, leaving behind a world blanketed in thick, pristine snow.
Sunlight pierced the thin clouds and fell over Kent Farm, reflecting a dazzling brilliance.
The air was crisp and clear, carrying an icy chill like crystal shards into the lungs.
Last night's fury seemed like nothing more than a nightmare. Only the enormous icicles hanging from the eaves and the fences nearly buried beneath the snow silently told of that white catastrophe.
The sound of a pickup engine approached from afar, breaking the stillness of the snowy morning.
A dark green military four-wheel-drive vehicle caked with muddy snow and a somewhat old brown sedan, like two small boats in a sea of snow, struggled through knee-deep drifts before finally stopping on the nearly buried path in front of the Kent house.
The doors opened almost at the same time, and a group of people poured out, unable to conceal their anxiety.
At their head was a burly middle-aged man in a crisp Army service uniform, silver stars set on his shoulder boards.
His face was sharply defined, his eyes as keen as an eagle's, carrying the toughness unique to a career soldier and a trace of deeply suppressed exhaustion.
The moment he stepped out, his gaze swept anxiously over the farmhouse entrance like a searchlight, his feet instinctively ready to rush forward.
At nearly the same moment, the front door was pushed open.
Locke and old Henry, wrapped in a thick coat, stepped outside and met the uniformed man's urgent gaze head-on.
In an instant.
Locke's calm eyes narrowed ever so slightly.
When he had heard "Gabe and Sam" over the phone last night, he had only thought Sam was a common name and had not given