g them sustenance.

Oftimes they stopped in vain--the beast which they sought to succor was
beyond aid--and a revolver shot sounded, muffled in the thickness of
the storm. Then, with knives and axes, the attack came, and struggling
forms bore to a ranch house the smoking portions of a newly butchered
beef; food at least for one family until the relief of sun and warmth
would come. It was a never-ending agony of long hours and
muscle-straining work. But the men who partook--were men.

And side by side with the others, with giant Ba'tiste, with the silent
woodsmen, with the angular, wiry ranchmen, was Barry Houston. His
muscles ached. His head was ablaze with the eye-strain of constant
white; his body numbed with cold from the time that he left the old
cannon-ball stove of the boarding house in the early morning until he
returned to it at night. Long ago had he lost hope,--so far as
personal aims and desires were concerned. The Crestline road was tied
up; it had quit completely; Barry Houston knew that the fury of the
storm in this basin country below the hills was as nothing compared to
the terror of those crag tops where altitude added to the frigidity,
and where from mountain peak to mountain peak the blizzard leaped with
ever-increasing ferocity. Far out on the level stretches leading up to
the plains of Wyoming, other men were working, struggling doggedly from
telegraph pole to telegraph pole, in an effort to repair the lines so
that connection might be made to Rawlins, and thence to Cheyenne and
Denver,--to apprise the world that a great section of the country had
been cut off from aid, that women and children were suffering from lack
of food, that every day brought the news of a black splotch in the
snow,--the form of a man, arms outstretched, face buried in the drift,
who had fought and lost. But so far, there had been only failure. It
was a struggle that made men grim and dogged; Barry Houston no less
than the rest. He had ceased to think of the simpler things of life,
of the ordinary problems, the usual worries or likes and dislikes. His
path led once by the home of Medaine Robinette, and he clambered toward
the little house with little more of feeling than of approaching that
of the most unfamiliar ranchman.

Smoke was coming from the chimney. There were the marks of snowshoes.
But they might mean nothing in the battle for existence. Houston
scrambled up to the veranda and banged on the door. A