per in the city:

"'Can't you help us? Please try to start campaign to force Crestline
Road to open the Pass. Women and children are starving here. We have
been cut off from the rest of the world for two weeks. We need
food--and coal. Road will not be open for four or five weeks more
under ordinary circumstances. This will mean death to many of us here,
the wiping out of a great timber and agricultural country, and a blot
on the history of Colorado. Help us--and we will not forget it."

"'THE CITIZENS OF THE WEST COUNTRY.'"

"Ah, _oui_!" Old Ba'tiste was addressing the rest of the crowd. "The
newspapers, they can help, better than any one else. Eet is our
chance. _Bon_--good! _Mon_ Baree, he have the big, what-you-say,
sentiment."

"Sounds good." The telegrapher was busily putting it on the wire.
Then a wait of hours,--hours in which the operator varied his routine
by sending the word of the stricken country to Cheyenne, to Colorado
Springs, to Pueblo, and thence, through the news agencies, to the rest
of the world.

"Might as well get everybody in on it," he mused, as he pounded the
telegraph instrument; "can't tell--some of those higher-ups might be in
New York and think there wasn't anything to it unless they could see it
in the New York papers. I--" Then he stopped as the wire cut under
his finger and clattered forth a message. He jumped. He grasped
Ba'tiste in his lank arms, then turned beaming to the rest of the
gaping crowd.

"It's from the papers in Denver!" he shouted. "A joint message.
They've taken up the fight!"

A fight which had its echoes in the little railroad box car, the center
of the deadened, shrouded West Country, the news of which must travel
to Cheyenne, to Rawlins, thence far down through the northern country
over illy patched telegraph wires before it reached the place for which
it was intended, the box car and its men who came and went, eager for
the slightest word from the far-away, yet grudging of their time, lest
darkness still find them in the snows, and night come upon them
struggling to reach the little town and send them into wandering,
aimless journeys that might end in death. For the snows still swirled,
the storms still came and went, the red ball of the sun still refused
to come forth in its beaming strength. And it was during this period
of uncertainty that Houston met Ba'tiste Renaud, returning from a
cruising expedition far in the lake region, to f