doggedly. Only soggy deadness
answered. He tested his plugs and tried again. In vain. An hour
later, he still was there, fighting for the impossible, striving to
gain an answer from vacancy, struggling to instil life into a thing
deadened by ice, and drifts, and wind, and broken, sagging telegraph
poles. The line was gone!

CHAPTER XIX

Until dusk they remained in the boxlike station, hoping against hope.
But the whine and snarl of the wind were the only sounds that came to
them, the steady banking of the snow against the windows the only
evidence of life. The telegraph line, somewhere between Tabernacle and
the country which lay over the bleak, now deadly range, was a shattered
thing, with poles buried in drifts, with loose strands of wire swinging
in the gusts of the blizzard, with ice coated upon the insulations, and
repair--until the sun should come and the snows melt--an almost
impossible task.

"It'd take a guy with a diving suit to find some of them wires, I
guess," the operator hazarded, as he finally ceased his efforts and
reached for his coat and hat and snowshoes. "There ain't no use
staying here. You fellows are going to sleep in town to-night, ain't
you?"

There was little else to do. They fought their way to the rambling
boarding house, there to join the loafing group in what passed for a
lobby and to watch with them the lingering death of day in a shroud of
white. Night brought no cessation of the wind, no lessening of the
banks of snow which now were drifting high against the first-story
windows; the door was only kept in working order through constant
sallies of the bent old boarding-house keeper, with his snow shovel.

Windows banged and rattled, with a muffled, eerie sound; snow sifted
through the tiniest cracks, spraying upon those who sat near them. The
old cannon-ball stove, crammed with coal, reached the point where dull
red spots enlivened its bulging belly; yet the big room was cold with
non-detectable drafts, the men shivered in spite of their heavy
clothing, and the region outside the immediate radius of the heater was
barn-like with frigidity. Midnight came, and the group about the stove
slept in their chairs, rather than undergo the discomfort and coldness
of bed.

Morning brought no relief. The storm was worse, if anything, and the
boarding-house keeper faced drifts waist high at the doorway with his
first shoveling expedition of the day. The telegrapher, at the