ou.

Next day the blizzard broke and we found Pinto standing in the hayshed,
still hitched to the buggy, quietly munching hay.

When the landseekers had left and the plains had seemed emptier and more
silent than before, it had seemed to Ida Mary and me, let down from our
high-pitched excitement, that there was not much incentive in doing
anything. But, after all, there was no time to be bored that winter. The
grim struggle to hang on demanded all our energy.

When I had first visited the McClure _Press_, I had looked distastefully
at Myrtle's ink-stained hands and face, and at the black apron stiff
with ink which she wore at her work. Now there were nights when, after
turning the press or addressing papers still wet with ink until
midnight, I fell upon the cot and slept without washing or undressing.
At such times Myrtle, with her cheerful unconcern, became an exalted
creature.

The next morning I would make a stab at cleaning myself up, eat
breakfast on the small inking table drawn close to the fire, with a
clean paper over the black surface for a tablecloth, and go to work
again.

When blizzards raged they drove the snow through the shack like needles
of steel. There was not a spot where I could put that cot to keep dry,
so I covered my face with the blankets, which in the morning were
drifted over with snow. Where did the lumber industry get hold of all
the knotholes it sold the poor homesteader?

For a girl who had come to the prairie for her health, I was getting
heroic treatment, wrestling all day with the heavy, old-fashioned,
outworn printing press, heavy manual labor for long hours, sleeping with
the snow drifting over me at night.

It was during one of these great storms that I rode in one of the last
covered wagons, one of the few tangible links between the pioneers of
the past and the pioneers of the present--and a poignant, graphic
reminder that men and women had endured storm and discomfort and
disaster for decades as we were enduring them now, and as people would
continue to endure them as long as the land remained to be conquered.

One morning after the hardest snowstorm I had seen, I awoke in the print
shop to find myself corralled by snowdrifts which the wind had driven up
over the windows and four or five feet high in front of the door. I
could barely see over the top of the upper panes.

That was Friday. Until Sunday I waited, cut off from the
world--wondering about Ida Mary! If she were