Six boys from an American grammar school are caught by a blizzard in a mountain hut with a runaway and a hunted man. H. Irving Hancock wrote several long series for boys - West Point, Annapolis, the high school - with the same brisk competence and the same insistence on fair play. The snow, the fuel and the food are counted carefully, and the crisis turns on rationing rather than heroics. Fifty-seven plates of snowbound coasts, winter woods and mountain ranges by painters including Winslow Homer and Albert Bierstadt answer the book's own cold with the same steady light.