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 of this, might not one burn coarse grass if necessary, or stalks of corn, or even ears of corn?  No tree showed in scores of miles, and often from smoke to tiny smoke it was farther than one could see, even in the clear blue mocking morn; yet the little houses were low and warm, and each had its makeshift for fuel, and in each the husband ate, and the wife sewed, and the babes wept and prattled as they have in generations past; and none looked on the sky to call it treacherous.

One morning the sun rose with a swift bound into a cloudless field.  The air was mild, dead, absolutely silent and motionless.  The wires along the railway alone sang loudly, as though in warning—­a warning unfounded and without apparent cause.  Yet the sighing in the short grass was gone.  In the still air the smokes of the town rose directly upright; and answering to them faint, thin spires rose here and there far out over the prairies, all straight, unswerving, ominous, terrible.  There was a great hush, a calm, a pause upon all things.  The sky was blue and cloudless, but at last it could not conceal the mockery it bore upon its face, so that when men looked at it and listened to the singing of the wires they stopped, and without conscious plan hurried on, silent, to the nearest company.

Somewhere, high up in the air, unheralded, invisible, there were passing some thin inarticulate sounds, far above the tops of the tallest smoke spires, as though some Titan blew a far jest across the continent to another near the sea, who answered with a gusty laugh, sardonic, grim, foreknowing.  Every horse free on the range came into the coulees that morning, and those which were fenced in ran up and down excitedly.  Men ate and smoked, and women darned, and babes played.  In a thousand homes there was content with this new land, so wild at one time, but now so quickly tamed, so calm, so gentle, so thoroughly subdued.

The sun came on, valiantly stripped bare, knowing what was to be.  Still louder rose the requiem of the wire.  The sky smiled on.  There was no token to strike with alarm these human beings, their faculties dulled by a thousand years of differentiation.  “Peace and goodwill,” said men; for now it was coming on to Christmastide.  But the wire was seeking to betray the secret of the sky, which was resolved to carry war, to sweep these beings from the old range that once was tenantless!