s cord--the one in the lead may
fall and pull the other one over. We had better make haste."

Houston stepped before her. A moment later they were edging their way
down the declivity of what once had been a railroad track, at last to
veer. The drifts from the mountain side had become too sharp; it was
easier to accept the more precipitous and shorter journey, straight
downward, the nearest cut toward those welcome spires of smoke.

Gradually the snow shook or was melted from their clothing, through
sheer bodily warmth. Black dots they became,--dots which appeared late
in the afternoon to the laboring crews of the snow-fighters far below;
dots which appeared and disappeared, edging their way about beetling
precipices, plunging forward, then stopping; pulling themselves out of
the heavier drifts, where drops of ten and even twenty feet had thrown
them; swinging and tacking; scrambling downward in long, almost running
descents, then crawling slowly along the ice walls, while the jutting
peaks about them seemed to close them in, seemed to threaten and seek
to engulf them in their pitfalls, only to break from them at last and
allow them once more to resume their journey.

Breaks and stops, falls and plunges into drift after drift; through the
glasses the workers below could see that a man was in the lead, with
something strapped to his back, which the woman in the rear adjusted
now and then, when it became partially displaced by the plunging
journey. Banks of snow cut them off; snowshoes sank in air
pockets--holes made by protruding limbs of the short, gnarled trees of
timber line,--and through these the man fought in short, spasmodic
lunges, breaking the way for the woman who came behind, never stopping
except to gather strength for a fresh attack, never ceasing for
obstacle or for danger. Once, at the edge of an overhanging ledge, he
scrambled furiously, failed and fell,--to drop in a drift far below, to
crawl painfully back to the waiting dot above, and to guide her, by
safer paths, on downward. Hours! The dots grew larger. The glasses
no longer were needed. On they came, stumbling, reeling, at last to
stagger across the frozen, wind-swept surface of a small lake and
toward the bunk cars of the snow crews. The woman wavered and fell; he
caught her. Then double-weighted, a pack on his back, a form in his
arms, he came on, his blood-red eyes searching almost sightlessly the
faces of the waiting, stolid, grease