agreed Ba'tiste, and turned again toward the telegrapher,
once more alert over a speaking key. But before it could carry
anything but a fragmentary message, life was gone again, and the
operator turned to the snow-caked window, with its dreary exterior of
whirling snow that seemed to come ever faster.

"Things are going to get bad in this country if this keeps up," came at
last. "There ain't any too great a stock of food."

"How about hay for the cattle?"

"All right. I guess. If the ranchers can get to it. But that's the
trouble about this snow. It ain't like the usual spring blizzard.
It's dry as a January fall, and it's sure drifting. Keeps up for four
or five days; they'll be lucky to find the haystacks."

For a long time then, the three stood looking out the window,
striving--merely for the sake of passing time--to identify the almost
hidden buildings of the little town, scarcely more than a hundred yards
away. At last the wire opened again, and the operator went once more
to his desk. Ba'tiste and Houston waited for him to give some report.
But there was none. At last:

"What is it?" Houston was at his side. The operator looked up.

"Denver asking Marionville if it can put its snowplow through and try
to buck the drifts from this side. No answer yet."

A long wait. Then:

"Well, that's done. Only got one Mallett engine at Marionville. Other
two are in the shop. One engine couldn't--"

He stopped. He bent over the key. His face went white--tense.

"God!"

"What's wrong?" The two men were close beside him now.

"Number one-eleven's kicked over the hill!"

"One-eleven--kicked over?"

"Yes. Snowplow. They're wiring Denver, from Crestline. The second
plow's up there in the snowshed with the crew. One of 'em's dead. The
other's--wait a minute, I have to piece it together."

A silence, except for the rattling of the key, broken, jagged, a
clattering voice of the distance, faint in the roar and whine of the
storm, yet penetrating as it carried the news of a far-away world,--a
world where the three waiting men knew that all had turned to a white
hell of wintry fury; where the grim, forbidding mountains were now the
abiding place of the snow-ledge and the avalanche; where even steel and
the highest product of invention counted for nothing against the blast
of the wind and the swirl of the tempest. Then finally, as from far
away, a strained voice came, the operator's:

"Ice had