ore
replenishment came from the murky, discolored stream of melted snow
water which churned beneath a sapling bridge. Panting and light-headed
from the altitude, Barry leaned against the machine for a moment, then
suddenly straightened to draw his coat tighter about him and to raise
the collar about his neck. The wind, whistling down from above, was
cold: something touched his face and melted there,--snow!

The engine was cool now. Barry leaped to the wheel and once more began
his struggle upward, a new seriousness upon him, a new grimness
apparent in the tightness of his lips. The tiny rivulets of the road
had given place to gushing streams; here and there a patch of snow
appeared in the highway; farther above, Barry could see that the white
was unbroken, save for the half-erased marks of the two cars which had
made the journey before him. The motor, like some refreshed animal,
roared with a new power and new energy, vibrant, confident, but the
spirit was not echoed by the man at the wheel. He was in the midst of
a fight that was new to him, a struggle against one of the mightiest
things that Nature can know, the backbone of the Rocky Mountains,--a
backbone which leered above him in threatening, vicious coldness, which
nowhere held surcease; it must be a battle to the end!

Up--up--up--the grades growing steadily heavier, the shifting clouds
enveloping him and causing him to stop at intervals and wait in
shivering impatience until they should clear and allow him once more to
continue the struggle. Grayness and sunshine flitted about him; one
moment his head was bowed against the sweep of a snow flurry, driving
straight against him from the higher peaks, the next the brilliance of
mountain sunshine radiated about him, cheering him, exhilarating him,
only to give way to the dimness of damp, drifting mists, which closed
in upon him like some great, gray garment of distress and held him in
its gloomy clutch until the grade should carry him above it and into
the sun or snow again.

Higher! The machine was roaring like a desperate, cornered thing now;
its crawling pace slackening with the steeper inclines, gaining with
the lesser raises, then settling once more to the lagging pace as
steepness followed steepness, or the abruptness of the curve caused the
great, slow-moving vehicle to lose the momentum gained after hundreds
of feet of struggle. Again the engine boiled, and Barry stood beside
it in shivering gratit