ross
over the silver disc.

There was usually a wet snowstorm in late October; this year it did
not come. A weird, dull stillness was in the air. Then, one evening
toward the end of the first week in November, the snow came, falling
lightly and noiselessly. As the evening advanced, the wind arose; and
even as it increased in violence, the spirit in the thermometer fell.
The wind became a gale, and before midnight a blizzard was howling and
sweeping through the Bad Lands such as no one there had ever known
before. The snow was like the finest powder, driving through every
crack and nail hole, and piling snowdrifts within the houses as well
as without.

"Upon getting up in the morning," said Lincoln Lang long afterward,
describing that storm, "the house was intensely cold, with everything
that could freeze frozen solid. The light was cut off from the
windows looking south. As we opened the front door, we were confronted
by a solid wall of snow reaching to the eaves of the house. There was
no drift over the back door, looking north, but, as I opened it, I was
blown almost from my feet by the swirl of the snow, which literally
filled the air, so that it was impossible to see any of the
surrounding ranch-buildings or even the fence, less than fifty feet
distant. It was like a tornado of pure white dust or very fine sand,
icy cold, and stinging like a whip-lash."

As fast as the fine dry snow fell, it drifted and packed itself into
the coulees, gulches, and depressions, filling them to a depth of a
hundred feet or more. The divides and plateaus, and other exposed
places, were left almost bare, except where some mound or rock or bit
of sagebrush created an obstruction, about which the eddying currents
piled snowdrifts which rose week after week to huge proportions. On
the river bottoms where the sagebrush was thick, the snow lay level
with the top of the brush, then drove on to lodge and pack about the
cottonwood trees and beneath the river-banks, forming great drifts,
extending here and there from bank to bank.

The blizzard abated, but the icy cold did not; another blizzard came,
and another and another. Save as it was whirled by the wind,
ultimately to become a part of some great drift, the snow remained
where it fell. No momentary thaw came to carry away a portion of the
country's icy burden, or to alleviate for a few hours the strain on
the snowbound men and women in the lonely ranch-houses. On the bottoms
the snow