“That’s so,” said Sam sententiously.  “We can’t help it.  We all got to go some day.”  His words drove Franklin again to his feet, and he walked up and down, his face gone pinched and old.

“I ’low we won’t sleep much to-night, Cap,” said Sam quietly.  “Come on; let’s go git some coffee, an’ see if anybody here in town is needin’ help.  We’ll pull out soon as we kin see in the mornin’.”

They went out into the cold, staggering as the icy sheet drove full against them.  Ellisville was blotted out.  There was no street, but only a howling 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.