to drift with the wind:  they were men toughened by exposure to the breath of the north, men winnowed out from many thousands of their kind.  Nor were they driven:  they were led.  Mellen was among them constantly; so was the soft-voiced smiling Parker, not to mention O’Neil with his cheery laugh and his words of praise.  Yet often it was hard to keep the work moving at all; for steam condensed in the cylinders, valves froze unless constantly operated, pipes were kept open only by the use of hot cloths:  then, too, the snow crept upward steadily, stealthily, until it lay in heavy drifts which nearly hid the little town and changed the streets to miniature canons.

Out of this snow-smothered, frost-bound valley there was but one trail.  The army lay encamped in a cul de sac; all that connected it with the outside world were two slender threads of steel.  To keep them clear of snow was in itself a giant’s task; for as yet there were no snow-sheds, and in many places the construction-trains passed through deep cuts between solid walls of white.  Every wind filled these level and threatened to seal the place fast; but furiously the “rotaries” attacked the choking mass, slowly it was whirled aside, and onward flowed that steady stream of supplies.  No army of investment was ever in such constant peril of being cut off.  For every man engaged in the attack there was another behind him fighting back the allied forces which swept down from either hand.

Only those who know that far land in her sterner moods can form any conception of the stupefying effect of continuous, unbroken cold.  There is a point beyond which the power of reaction ceases:  where the human mind and body recoils uncontrollably from exposure, and where the most robust effort results in a spiritless inactivity.  It is then that efficiency is cut in half, then cut again.  And of all the terrors of the Arctic there is none so compelling as the wind.  It is a monstrous, deathly thing, a creature that has life and preys upon the agony of men.  There are regions sheltered from it, of course; but in the gutters which penetrate the mountain ranges it lurks with constant menace, and of all the coast from Sitka westward the valley of the Salmon is the most evil.

In the throat of this mighty-mouthed funnel, joining the still, abysmal cold of the interior with the widely varying temperatures of the open sea, O’Neil’s band was camped, and there the great hazard was played.  Under such conditions it was fortunate indeed that he had field-marshals like Parker and Mellen, for no single man could have triumphed.  Parker was cautious, brilliant, far-sighted; he reduced the battle to paper, he blue-printed it; with sliding-rule he analyzed it into inches and pounds and stresses and strains:  Mellen was like a grim Hannibal, tireless, cunning, cold, and he wove steel in his fingers as a woman weaves her thread.

It was a remarkable alliance, a triumvirate of its kind unsurpassed.  As the weeks crept into months it worked an engineering marvel.