then with fear.
For to-night was the last night, the last either in the struggle or in
the lives of those who had fought their way upward to the final
barricade which yet separated them from the top of the world,--the
Death Trail.

Smooth and sleek it showed before Houston in the early moonlight, an
icy Niagara, the snow piled high above the railroad tracks, extending
upward against an almost sheer wall of granite, in stacks and drifts,
banked in places to a depth of a hundred feet. Already the plows were
assembled,--four heavy steel monsters, with tremendous beams lashed in
place and jutting upward, that they might break the overcasts and knock
down the snow roofings that otherwise might form tunnels, breaking the
way above as the tremendous fan of the plow would break it below. This
was to be the fight of fights, there in the moonlight. Houston could
see the engines breathing lazily behind their plows, sixteen great,
steel contrivances, their burdens graduated in size from the tremendous
auger at the fore to the lesser, almost diminutive one, by comparison,
at the rear, designed to take the last of the offal from the track.
For there would be no ice here; the drippings of the snowsheds, with
their accompanying stalactites and stalagmites, were absent. A quick
shoot and a lucky one. Otherwise,--the men who went forward to their
engines would not speak of it. But there was one who did.

She was standing beside the cook car as Houston passed, and she looked
toward him with a glance that caused Barry to stop and to wait, as
though she had called to him. Hesitatingly she came forward, and
Houston's dulled mentality at last took cognizance that a hand was
extended slightly.

"You're still working on the engine?"

"Yes."

"Then you'll be with them?"

"On the Death Trail? I expect to."

"They talk of it as something terrible. Why?"

Houston pointed to the forbidding wall of snow. His thick, broken lips
mumbled in the longest speech he had known in days.

"It's all granite up there. The cut of the roadbed forms a base for
the remainder of the snow. It's practically all resting on the tracks;
above, there's nothing for the snow to cling to. When we cut out the
foundation--they're afraid that the vibration will loosen the rest and
start an avalanche. It all depends whether it comes before--or after
we've passed through."

"And you are not afraid?" She asked it almost childishly. He shook
his head.