o strangeness in this now. He merely assured
himself by his scrutiny that within his train all was right. Outside--

Connery was not so sure of that; rather, he had been becoming more
certain hour by hour all through the evening, that they were going to
have great difficulty in getting the train through. Though he knew by
President Jarvis' note that the officials of the road must be watching
the progress of this especial train with particular interest, he had
received no train-orders from the west for several hours. His inquiry
at the last stop had told him the reason for this; the telegraph wires
to the west had gone down. To the east, communication was still open,
but how long it would remain so he could not guess. Here in the deep
heart of the great mountains--they had passed the Idaho boundary-line
into Montana--they were getting the full effect of the storm; their
progress, increasingly slow, was broken by stops which were becoming
more frequent and longer as they struggled on. As now they fought
their way slower and slower up a grade, and barely topping it,
descended the opposite slope at greater speed as the momentum of the
train was added to the engine-power, Connery's mind went back to the
second sleeper with its single passenger, and he spoke to the Pullman
conductor, who nodded and went toward that car. The weather had
prevented the expected increase of their number of passengers at
Spokane; only a few had got aboard there; there were worse grades
ahead, in climbing which every pound of weight would count; so
Connery--in the absence of orders and with Jarvis' note in his
pocket--had resolved to drop the second sleeper.

At Fracroft--the station where he was to exchange the ordinary plow
which so far had sufficed, and couple on the "rotary" to fight the
mountain drifts ahead--he swung himself down from the train, looked in
at the telegraph office and then went forward to the two giant
locomotives, on whose sweating, monstrous backs the snow, suddenly
visible in the haze of their lights, melted as it fell. He waited on
the station platform while the second sleeper was cut out and the train
made up again. Then, as they started, he swung aboard and in the
brightly lighted men's compartment of the first Pullman checked up his
report-sheets with a stub of pencil. They had stopped again, he
noticed; now they were climbing a grade, more easily because of the
decrease of weight; now a trestle rumbled under