is not for Golemar to
go with us. The drift, they are deep. There is no crust on the snow.
Golemar, he would sink above his head. Then blooey! There would be no
Golemar!"

Guide lines were affixed. Once more, huddled, clumsy figures of white,
one following the other, they made the gruelling trip back to
Tabernacle and the duties which they knew lay before them. For already
the reports were beginning to come in, brought by storm-weakened,
blizzard-battered men, of houses where the roofs had crashed beneath
the weight of snow, of lost ranchmen, of bawling cattle, drifting
before the storm,--to death. It was the beginning of a two-weeks'
siege of a white inferno.

Little time did Barry Houston have for thought in those weeks. There
were too many other things to crowd upon him; too many cold, horrible
hours in blinding snow, or in the faint glare of a ruddy sun which only
broke through the clouds that it might jeer at the stricken country
beneath it, then fade again in the whipping gusts of wind and its
attendant clouds, giving way once more to the surging sweep of white
and the howl of a freshened blizzard.

Telegraph poles reared only their cross-arms above the mammoth drifts.
Haystacks became buried, lost things. The trees of the forest,
literally harnessed with snow, dropped their branches like tired arms
too weary to longer bear their burdens. The whole world, it seemed,
was one great, bleak thing of dreary white,--a desert in which there
was life only that there might be death, where the battle for existence
continued only as a matter of instinct.

And through--or rather over--this bleak desert went the men of the West
Country, silent, frost-burned men, their lips cracked from the cut of
wind, their eyes blood-red with inflammation, struggling here and there
with a pack of food upon their back that they might reach some desolate
home where there were women and children; or stopping to pull and tug
at a snow-trapped steer and by main effort, drag him into a barren spot
where the sweep of the gale had kept the ground fairly clear of snow;
at times also, they halted to dig into a haystack, and through long
hours scattered the welcome food about for the bawling cattle; or
gathered wood, where such a thing was possible, and lighting great
fires, left them, that they might melt the snows about a spot near a
supply of feed, where the famished cattle could gather and await the
next trip of the rescuers, bearin