To the north there appeared a long, black cloud, hanging low as the trail of some far-off locomotive, new upon the land.  Even the old hunters might have called it but the loom of the line of the distant sand hills upon the stream.  But all at once the cloud sprang up, unfurling tattered battle flags, and hurrying to meet the sun upon the zenith battle ground.  Then the old hunters and trappers saw what was betokened.  A man came running, laughing, showing his breath white on the air.  The agent at the depot called sharply to the cub to shut the door.  Then he arose and looked out, and hurried to his sender to wire east along the road for coal, train loads of coal, all the coal that could be hurried on!  This man knew the freight of the country, in and out, and he had once trapped for a living along these same hills and plains.  He knew what was the meaning of the cloud, and the tall pointed spires of smoke, and the hurrying naked sun.

The cloud swept up and onward, and all persons closed their doors, and said that Christmas would be cold.  In a quarter of an hour they saw their chronology late by a day.  In half an hour they noted a gray mist drive across the sky.  There was a faint wavering and spreading and deflection at the top of the tallest spire of smoke.  Somewhere, high above, there passed a swarm of vast humming bees.

Out in the country, miles away from town, a baby played in the clear air, resting its plump knees in the shallow layer of chips where once a pile of wood had been.  It turned its face up toward the sky, and something soft and white and cool dropped down upon its cheek.

In mid-sky met the sun and the cloud, and the sun was vanquished, and all the world went gray.  Then, with a shriek and a whirl of a raw and icy air which dropped, dropped down, colder and colder and still more cold, all the world went white.  This snow came not down from the sky, but slantwise across the land, parallel with the earth, coming from the open side of the coldest nether hell hidden in the mysterious North.  Over it sang the air spirits.  Above, somewhere, there was perhaps a sky grieving at its perfidy.  Across the world the Titans laughed and howled.  All the elements were over-ridden by a voice which said, “I shall have back my own!” For presently the old Plains were back again, and over them rushed the wild winds in their favourite ancient game.

Once the winds pelted the slant snow through the interstices of the grasses upon the furry back of the cowering coyote.  Now they found a new sport in driving the icy powder through the cracks of the loose board shanty, upon the stripped back of the mother huddling her sobbing children against the empty, impotent stove, perhaps wrapping her young in the worn and whitened robe of the buffalo taken years ago.  For it was only the buffalo, though now departed, which held the frontier for America in this unprepared season, the Christmas of the Great Cold.  The robes saved many of the children, and now and then a mother also.