ing lane of white. Not half a dozen lights were visible.
The tank at the railway, the big hotel, the station-house, were
gone--wiped quite away. The Plains were back again!

"Don't git off the main street," gasped Sam as they turned their faces
down wind to catch their breath. "Touch the houses all along. Lord!
ain't it cold!"

Ellisville was safe, or all of it that they could stumblingly discover.
The town did not sleep. People sat up, greeting joyously any who came
to them, eating, drinking, shivering in a cold whose edge could not be
turned. It was an age till morning--until that morning of deceit.

At dawn the wind lulled. The clouds swept by and the sun shone for an
hour over a vast landscape buried under white. Sam was ready to start,
having worked half the night making runners for a sled at which his
wild team snorted in the terror of unacquaintedness. The sled box was
piled full of robes and coal and food and liquor--all things that
seemed needful and which could hurriedly be secured. The breath of the
horses was white steam, and ice hung on the faces of the men before
they had cleared the town and swung out into the reaches of the open
prairies which lay cold and empty all about them. They counted the
smokes--Peterson, Johnson, Clark, McGill, Townsend, one after another;
and where they saw smoke they rejoiced, and where they saw none they
stopped. Often it was but to nail fast the door.

With perfect horsemanship Sam drove his team rapidly on to the south,
five miles, ten miles, fifteen, the horses now warming up, but still
restless and nervous, even on the way so familiar to them from their
frequent journeyings. The steam of their breath enveloped the
travellers in a wide, white cloud. The rude runners crushed into and
over the packed drifts, or along the sandy grime where the wind had
swept the earth bare of snow. In less than an hour they would see the
Halfway House. They would know whether or not there was smoke.

But in less than two hours on that morning of deceit the sun was lost
again. The winds piped up, the cold continued, and again there came
the blinding snow, wrapping all things in its dancing, dizzy mist.

In spite of the falling of the storm, Franklin and his companion pushed
on, trusting to the instinct of the plains horses, which should lead
them over a trail that they had travelled so often before. Soon the
robes and coats were driven full of snow; the horses were anxiou