or slept, there sometimes waved a
hand, there sometimes sounded a Voice, as that which of old summoned
the prophet in the watches of the night. Neither in his waking nor his
sleeping hours could he call this spirit into materialization, however
much he longed to wrestle with it finally. It remained only to haunt
him vaguely, to join with the shade of Mary Ellen the Cruel to set
misery on a life which he had thought happily assured.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE GREAT COLD

The land lay trusting and defenceless under a cynical sky, which was
unthreatening but mocking. Dotting a stretch of country thirty miles
on either side of the railway, and extending as far to the east and
west along its line, there were scattered hundreds of homes, though
often these were separated one from the other by many miles of open
prairie. Fences and fields appeared, and low stacks of hay and straw
here and there stood up above the vast gray surface of the old buffalo
and cattle range. Some of these houses were board "shacks," while
others were of sods, and yet others, these among the earliest
established on the plains, the useful dugout, half above and half
beneath the ground. Yet each building, squat or tall, small or less
small, was none the less a home. Most of them contained families. Men
had brought hither their wives and children--little children, sometimes
babes, tender, needful of warmth and care. For these stood guardian
the gaunt coal chutes of the town, with the demands of a population of
twenty-five hundred, to say nothing of the settlers round about, a
hundred tons for a thousand families, scattered, dwelling out along
breaks and _coulees_, and on worn hillsides, and at the ends of long,
faint, wandering trails, which the first whirl of snow would softly and
cruelly wipe away.

Yet there was no snow. There had been none the winter before. The
trappers and skin-hunters said that the winter was rarely severe. The
railroad men had ranged west all the winter, throats exposed and coats
left at the wagons. It was a mild country, a gentle, tender country.
In this laughing sky who could see any cynicism? The wind was cold,
and the wild fowl flew clamouring south from the sheeted pools, but the
great hares did not change their colour, and the grouse stayed brown,
and the prairie dogs barked joyously. No harm could come to any one.
The women and children were safe. Besides, was there not coal at the
town? Quite outside