And yet, some miles ahead, striving hard to reach the railway in time to intercept this very train, a small battalion of cavalry was struggling through the blasts, officers and men afoot and dragging their own benumbed limbs and half-benumbed chargers through the drifts that lay deep at the bottom of every “coulee.”  Some few soldiers remained in saddle:  they were too frozen to walk at all.  Some few fell behind, and would have thrown themselves flat upon the prairie in the lethargy that is but premonition of death by freezing.  Like men half deadened by morphine, their rescue depended on heroic measures, humane in their seeming brutality.  Officers who at other times were all gentleness now fell upon the hapless stragglers with kicks and blows.  As the train drew up at the platform of a station in mid-prairie, a horseman enveloped in fur and frost and steam from his panting steed reined up beside the leading engine and shouted to the occupants of the cab,—­

“For God’s sake hold on a few minutes.  We’ve got a dozen frozen men with us we must send on to Fort Warrener.”  And the train was held.

Meantime, those far to the rear in the sleeper knew nothing of what was going on ahead.  The car was warm and comfortable, and most of its occupants were apparently appreciative of its shelter and coseyness in contrast with the cheerless scene without.  A motherly-looking woman had produced her knitting, and was blithely clicking away at her needles, while her enterprising son, a youth of four summers and undaunted confidence in human nature, tacked up and down the aisle and made impetuous incursions on the various sections by turns, receiving such modified welcome as could be accorded features streaked with mingled candy and cinders, and fingers whose propensity to cling to whatsoever they touched was due no more to instincts of a predatory nature than to the adhesive properties of the glucose which formed so large a constituent of the confections he had been industriously consuming since early morning.  Four men playing whist in the rearmost section, two or three commercial travellers, whose intimacy with the porter and airs of easy proprietorship told of an apparent controlling interest in the road, a young man of reserved manners, reading in a section all by himself, a baby sleeping quietly upon the seat opposite the two passengers first mentioned, and a Maltese kitten curled up in the lap of one of them, completed the list of occupants.

The proximity of the baby and the kitten furnishes strong presumptive evidence of the sex and general condition of the two passengers referred to, and renders detail superfluous.  A baby rarely travels without a woman, or a kitten with a woman already encumbered with a baby.  The baby belonged to the elder passenger, the kitten to the younger.  The one was a buxom matron, the other a slender maid.  In their ages there must have been a difference of fifteen years; in feature there was still wider disparity.  The