the store I thought once that I heard the whistle
of a locomotive; then I knew of course it was only the wind. "It'll be
a long time before you hear any such music as that," I said to myself.
There was nothing which would have sounded quite so good to me.

I was glad to get back to the house, where I could draw a breath of
air not full of powdered snow. I spent some time calking up cracks
around the windows, where the snow blew in. While I was doing this it
suddenly flashed into my mind, what if I should lose track of the
days of the month and week? I thought I would write down every day,
and got a piece of paper to begin on, when I noticed a calendar behind
the desk. I took the pen and scratched off "December 17," which was
gone, and which was the beginning of my life alone in Track's End; and
the first thing every morning after that while I stayed I marked off
the day before; and so I never lost my reckoning. Though, indeed, I
was soon to wake up in another and worse place than Track's End; but
of this I will tell later. I had very foolishly forgotten to wind the
clock the night before, and it had stopped, and I had no watch by
which to set it; but I started it, and trusted to find the clock at
the depot still going, as it was an eight-day one.

[Illustration: MY FAMILY AND I AT A MEAL, TRACK'S END]

I soon found myself hungry, and took it for granted that it was
dinner-time. The meals seemed pretty lonesome, because I had been used
to having a great deal of fun with Tom Carr and the others at such
times, much of it about my poor cooking. Kaiser and Pawsy appeared
willing to do what they could to make it pleasant; and this time I put
a chair at one end of the little table, and the cat jumped up in it
and began to purr like a young tiger, while the dog sat on the floor
at the other end and pounded the floor with his tail like any drummer
might beat his drum. I also began to get them into the bad practice of
eating at the same time I did; but I had to have some company.

It must have been two hours after dinner, and I was moving my bed down
into a little room between the office and kitchen, when I first saw
that the fury of the wind was beginning to lessen. The sky began to
lighten up, and from the front door I could soon catch glimpses of the
railroad windmill. I saw that I must start the plan I had thought of
the night before for keeping off the Pike gang without any delay. My
idea was that I must not let them kno