hoes would allow, oblivious for once of the cut of the
wind and the icy particles of its frigid breath.

"They open the road!" boomed Ba'tiste in chorus with the rest of the
little town. "Ah, _oui_! They open the road. The Crestline Railroad,
he have a heart after all, he have a--"

"Any old time!" It was a message bearer coming from the shack of a
station. "They're not going to do it--it's the M. P. & S. L."

"Through the tunnel?"

"No. Over the hill. According to the message, the papers hammered the
stuffing out of the Crestline road. But you've got to admit that they
haven't got either the motive power or the money. The other road saw a
great chance to step in and make itself solid with this country over
here. It's lending the men and the rolling stock. They're going to
open another fellow's road, for the publicity and the good will that's
in it."

A grin came to Houston's lips,--the first one in weeks. He banged
Ba'tiste on his heavily wadded shoulder.

"That's the kind of railroad to work for!"

"Ah, _oui_! And when eet come through--ah, we shall help to build it."

Two pictures flashed across Houston's brain; one of a snowy sawmill
with the force working day and night, when all the surrounding country
cried for help, working toward its selfish ends that it might have a
supply of necessary lumber in case a more humane organization should
fail; another of carload after carload of necessary machinery,
snow-covered, ice-bound, on a sidetrack at Tollifer, with the whole,
horrible, snow-clutched fierceness of the Continental Divide between it
and its goal.

"I hope so!" he exclaimed fervently. "I hope so!"

Then, swept along by hurrying forms, they went on toward the station
house, there to receive the confirmation of the glad news, to shout
until their throats were raw, and then, still with their duties before
them, radiate once more on their missions of mercy. For the
announcement of intention was no accomplishment. It was one thing for
the snowplows and the gangs and tremendous engines of the M. P. & S. L.
to attempt to open the road over the divide. But it was quite another
thing to do it!

All that day Houston thought of it, dreamed of it, tried to visualize
it,--the fight of a railroad against the snows of the hills. He
wondered how the snowplows would work, how they would break through the
long, black snowsheds, now crammed with the thing which they had been
built to resist. He th