The wind now had utterly died away.  The snow had resumed its thick, silent fall straight to earth.  Carrigan was kicking his boots clean against the door-sill when Lee exclaimed, “Listen to that, Pat!”

Carrigan wiped the moisture from his ears and harkened.

“That’s the Limited coming, and making no stops,” he remarked.  “Get in!”

They entered the little building.  The office contained the engineering staff and several others.  Tobacco smoke lay thick in the room.

Outside, the faint whining sound was growing steadily in volume until at last it deepened into a roar very like that of an approaching express train, as Pat had suggested.  Followed a smart blow on the shack.  Then it reeled and the night was filled with a howling tumult that deafened the men inside; the blizzard had burst upon the mesa.  Through the windows one could see nothing, for the air had become a black maelstrom of whirling snow and darkness where a choked roar persisted as steadily as the bass thunder of Niagara.  The warmth had vanished; a cutting cold, as if striking direct from arctic ice, minute by minute drove the mercury in the thermometer on Bryant’s wall downward with unbelievable swiftness.  If anything, the fury of the storm seemed to increase as time passed, swelling to such terrible violence that one imagined nothing could withstand its force, its mad blasts, its deadliness.

“Those mess tents and horse tents,” Lee said to Carrigan, anxiously.

“They’re safer under their lee of hay than is this little paper box we’re sitting in,” the contractor replied.  “I’ve been through blizzards before, and know how to meet them.”

From by the stove one of the engineers spoke.

“But we’ll never see some of those little tents any more.  There are several travelling toward Mexico by now.”

“And my new flannel shirt!” cried another, suddenly.  “Washed it this noon and hung it out on a line and forgot all about it.  Oh, Lord, where is it now?”

“Good-bye, little shirt, we’ll never see you more!” said the first, sentimentally.  “You’ll be hanging on the Equator by morning.”

“While we’re left here in the drifts,” said a third.  “Oh, the lovely, big, white drifts there’ll be to-morrow!”

Toward one o’clock the first furious rush of the storm had passed and it had settled into a fifty-mile-an-hour wind, bitterly cold, with snow that drove against the building in fine particles.  Freezing air never ceased to enter the thin walls of boards and tar paper.  It was necessary to keep the cast-iron stove red-hot to secure anything like comfort.

And to this dreadful cold and snow, thought Lee, Imogene would have been left deliberately by Ruth Gardner and Gretzinger!

Carrigan bade the others roll up in their blankets and get what sleep they could while he and Bryant tended the fire.  Lee saw that Dave was warm and well-wrapped.  The men, worn out by prolonged exertions, made themselves beds on the floor or stretched themselves out on their seats, drew their coverings closer, closed their eyes, slept.