-smeared men, his thick voice
drooling over bloody lips:

"Somebody take her--get her into the bunk cars. She's given out.
I'm-- I'm all right. Take care of her. I've got to go on--to
Tollifer!"

CHAPTER XXII

It was night when Barry Houston limped, muscles cramped and
frost-numbed, into the little undertaking shop at Tollifer and
deposited his tiny burden. Medaine Robinette had remained behind in
the rough care of the snow crews, while he, revived by steaming coffee
and hot food, had been brought down on a smaller snowplow, running
constantly, and without extra power, between Tollifer and "the front",
that the lines of communication be kept open.

"Nameless," he said with an effort, when the lengthy details of
certification were asked. "The mother--" and a necessary lie came to
his lips--"became unconscious before she could tell me anything except
that the baby had been baptized and called Helena. She wanted a
priest."

"I'll look after it. There's clothing?"

"Yes. In the pack. But wait--where does the Father live?"

The man pointed the way. Houston went on--to a repetition of his story
and a fulfillment of his duties. Then, from far up the mountain side,
there came the churning, grinding sound of the snowplow, and he hurried
toward the station house to greet it. There on a spur, in the faint
glow of an electric light, a short train was side-tracked, engineless,
waiting until the time should come when the road again would be
open, and the way over the Pass free. One glance told him what
it was: the tarpaulin-covered, snow-shielded, bulky forms of his
machinery,--machinery that he now felt he could personally aid to its
destination. For there was work ahead. Midnight found him in a shack
buried in snow and reached only by a circuitous tunnel, a shack where
men--no longer Americans, but black-smeared, red-eyed, doddering,
stumbling human machines--came and went, their frost-caked Mackinaws
steaming as they clustered about the red-hot stove, their faces smudged
with engine grease to form a coating against the stinging blast of the
ice-laden wind, their cheeks raw and bleeding, their mouths swollen
orifices which parted only for mumblings; vikings of another age, the
fighters of the ice gangs, of which Houston had become a part.

The floor was their bed; silently, speaking only for the purpose of
curses, they gulped the food that was passed out to them, taking the
steaming coffee straight