The White Desert Part 28

"I know. I'll call Denver. But I don't know what chance there is--the road's been waiting for a chance to go into bankruptcy, anyway--since this new Carrow Point deal is about through. They haven't got any money--you know that, Ba'tiste. It's cheaper for them to shut down for six weeks than to try to keep running. That fifty thousand they lost on that snowplow just about put the crimp in 'em. It might cost a couple of hundred thousand more to keep the road open. What's the result? It's easier to quit. But I'll try 'em--"

He turned to the key and hammered doggedly. Only soggy deadness answered. He tested his plugs and tried again. In vain. An hour later, he still was there, fighting for the impossible, striving to gain an answer from vacancy, struggling to instil life into a thing deadened by ice, and drifts, and wind, and broken, sagging telegraph poles. The line was gone!

CHAPTER XIX

Until dusk they remained in the boxlike station, hoping against hope.

But the whine and snarl of the wind were the only sounds that came to them, the steady banking of the snow against the windows the only evidence of life. The telegraph line, somewhere between Tabernacle and the country which lay over the bleak, now deadly range, was a shattered thing, with poles buried in drifts, with loose strands of wire swinging in the gusts of the blizzard, with ice coated upon the insulations, and repair--until the sun should come and the snows melt--an almost impossible task.

"It'd take a guy with a diving suit to find some of them wires, I guess," the operator hazarded, as he finally ceased his efforts and reached for his coat and hat and snowshoes. "There ain't no use staying here. You fellows are going to sleep in town to-night, ain't you?"

There was little else to do. They fought their way to the rambling boarding house, there to join the loafing group in what pa.s.sed for a lobby and to watch with them the lingering death of day in a shroud of white. Night brought no cessation of the wind, no lessening of the banks of snow which now were drifting high against the first-story windows; the door was only kept in working order through constant sallies of the bent old boarding-house keeper, with his snow shovel.

Windows banged and rattled, with a m.u.f.fled, eerie sound; snow sifted through the tiniest cracks, spraying upon those who sat near them. The old cannon-ball stove, crammed with coal, reached the point where dull red spots enlivened its bulging belly; yet the big room was cold with non-detectable drafts, the men shivered in spite of their heavy clothing, and the region outside the immediate radius of the heater was barn-like with frigidity. Midnight came, and the group about the stove slept in their chairs, rather than undergo the discomfort and coldness of bed.

Morning brought no relief. The storm was worse, if anything, and the boarding-house keeper faced drifts waist high at the doorway with his first shoveling expedition of the day. The telegrapher, at the frost-caked window, rubbed a spot with his hand and stared into the dimness of the flying snow, toward his station.

"Guess I'll have t' call for volunteers if I get in there to-day.

We'll have to tunnel."

Ba'tiste and Houston joined him. The box car that served as a station house--always an object of the heaviest drifts--was buried! The big French-Canadian pulled at his beard.

"Peuff! Eet is like the ground hog," he announced. "Eet is underground already."

"Yeh. But I've got to get in there. The wire might be working."

"So? We will help, Baree and Ba'teese. Come--we get the shovels."

Even that was work. The town simply had ceased to be; the stores were closed, solitude was everywhere. They forced a window and climbed into the little general merchandise establishment, simply because it was easier than striving to get in through the door. Then, armed with their shovels, they began the work of tunneling to the station. Two hours later, the agent once more at his dead key, Ba'tiste turned to Houston.

"Eet is the no use here," he announced. "We must get to camp and a.s.semble the men that are strong and willing to help. Then--"

"Yes?"

"Then, eet will be the battle to help those who are not fortunate.

There is death in this storm."

Again with their waist-belt guide lines, they started forth, to bend against the storm in a struggle that was to last for hours; to lose their trail, to find it again, through the straggling poles that in the old days had carried telephone wires, and at last to reach the squat, snowed-in buildings of camp. There, Ba'tiste a.s.sembled the workmen in the bunk house.

"There are greater things than this now," he announced. "We want the strong men--who will go back with us to Tabernacle, and who will be willing to take the risk to help the countryside. Ah, _oui_, eet is the danger that is ahead. How many of you will go?"

One after another they readied for their snowshoes, silent men who acted, rather than spoke. A few were left behind, to care for the camp in case of emergencies, to keep the roofs as free from snow as possible and to avoid cave-ins. The rest filed outside, one by one, awkwardly testing the bindings of their snowshoes, and awaiting the command. At the doorway, Ba'tiste, his big hands fumbling, caught the paws of Golemar, his wolf-dog, and raised the great, s.h.a.ggy creature against his breast.

"No," he said in kindly, indulgent fashion. "Eet is not for Golemar to go with us. The drift, they are deep. There is no crust on the snow.

Golemar, he would sink above his head. Then blooey! There would be no Golemar!"

Guide lines were affixed. Once more, huddled, clumsy figures of white, one following the other, they made the gruelling trip back to Tabernacle and the duties which they knew lay before them. For already the reports were beginning to come in, brought by storm-weakened, blizzard-battered men, of houses where the roofs had crashed beneath the weight of snow, of lost ranchmen, of bawling cattle, drifting before the storm,--to death. It was the beginning of a two-weeks'

siege of a white inferno.

Little time did Barry Houston have for thought in those weeks. There were too many other things to crowd upon him; too many cold, horrible hours in blinding snow, or in the faint glare of a ruddy sun which only broke through the clouds that it might jeer at the stricken country beneath it, then fade again in the whipping gusts of wind and its attendant clouds, giving way once more to the surging sweep of white and the howl of a freshened blizzard.

Telegraph poles reared only their cross-arms above the mammoth drifts.

Haystacks became buried, lost things. The trees of the forest, literally harnessed with snow, dropped their branches like tired arms too weary to longer bear their burdens. The whole world, it seemed, was one great, bleak thing of dreary white,--a desert in which there was life only that there might be death, where the battle for existence continued only as a matter of instinct.

And through--or rather over--this bleak desert went the men of the West Country, silent, frost-burned men, their lips cracked from the cut of wind, their eyes blood-red with inflammation, struggling here and there with a pack of food upon their back that they might reach some desolate home where there were women and children; or stopping to pull and tug at a snow-trapped steer and by main effort, drag him into a barren spot where the sweep of the gale had kept the ground fairly clear of snow; at times also, they halted to dig into a haystack, and through long hours scattered the welcome food about for the bawling cattle; or gathered wood, where such a thing was possible, and lighting great fires, left them, that they might melt the snows about a spot near a supply of feed, where the famished cattle could gather and await the next trip of the rescuers, bearing them sustenance.

Oftimes they stopped in vain--the beast which they sought to succor was beyond aid--and a revolver shot sounded, m.u.f.fled in the thickness of the storm. Then, with knives and axes, the attack came, and struggling forms bore to a ranch house the smoking portions of a newly butchered beef; food at least for one family until the relief of sun and warmth would come. It was a never-ending agony of long hours and muscle-straining work. But the men who partook--were men.

And side by side with the others, with giant Ba'tiste, with the silent woodsmen, with the angular, wiry ranchmen, was Barry Houston. His muscles ached. His head was ablaze with the eye-strain of constant white; his body numbed with cold from the time that he left the old cannon-ball stove of the boarding house in the early morning until he returned to it at night. Long ago had he lost hope,--so far as personal aims and desires were concerned. The Crestline road was tied up; it had quit completely; Barry Houston knew that the fury of the storm in this basin country below the hills was as nothing compared to the terror of those crag tops where alt.i.tude added to the frigidity, and where from mountain peak to mountain peak the blizzard leaped with ever-increasing ferocity. Far out on the level stretches leading up to the plains of Wyoming, other men were working, struggling doggedly from telegraph pole to telegraph pole, in an effort to repair the lines so that connection might be made to Rawlins, and thence to Cheyenne and Denver,--to apprise the world that a great section of the country had been cut off from aid, that women and children were suffering from lack of food, that every day brought the news of a black splotch in the snow,--the form of a man, arms outstretched, face buried in the drift, who had fought and lost. But so far, there had been only failure. It was a struggle that made men grim and dogged; Barry Houston no less than the rest. He had ceased to think of the simpler things of life, of the ordinary problems, the usual worries or likes and dislikes. His path led once by the home of Medaine Robinette, and he clambered toward the little house with little more of feeling than of approaching that of the most unfamiliar ranchman.

Smoke was coming from the chimney. There were the marks of snowshoes.

But they might mean nothing in the battle for existence. Houston scrambled up to the veranda and banged on the door. A moment more, and he faced Medaine Robinette.

"Just wanted to see if you're all right," came almost curtly.

"Yes--thank you."

"Need any food?"

"I have plenty."

"Anybody sick?"

"No. Lost Wing has found wood. We're keeping warm. Tell me--" and there was the politeness of emergency in her tones--"is there any need for women in Tabernacle? I am willing to go if--"

"Not yet. Besides, a woman couldn't get in there alone."

"I could. I'm strong enough. Besides, I've been out--I went to the Hurd Ranch yesterday. Mrs. Hurd's sick--Lost Wing brought me the word."

"Then keep on with that. There's nothing in Tabernacle--and no place for any one who isn't dest.i.tute. Stay here. Have you food enough for Hurd's?"

"Yes. That is--"

"I'll leave my pack. Take that over as you need it. There's enough for a week there. If things don't let up by that time, I'll be by again."

"Thank you."

Then the door was closed, and Houston went his way again, back to Tabernacle and a fresh supply for his pack--hardly realizing the fact that he had talked to the woman he could not help wishing for--the woman he would have liked to have loved. The world was almost too gray, too grim, too horrible for Houston even to remember that there was an estrangement between them. Dully, his intellect numbed as his body was numbed, he went back to his tasks,--tasks that were seemingly endless.

Day after day, the struggle remained the same, the wind, the snow, the drifts, the white fleece flying on the breast of the gale even when there were no storm clouds above, blotting out the light of the sun and causing the great ball to be only a red, ugly, menacing thing in a field of dismal gray. Night after night the drifts swept, changing, deepening in spots where the ground had been clear before, smoothing over the hummocks, weaving across the country like the vagaries of shifting sands before they finally packed into hard, compressed mounds, to form bulwarks for newer drifts when the next storm came. Day after day,--and then quiet, for forty-eight hours.

It caused men to shout,--men who had cursed the sun in the blazing noonday hours of summer, but men who now extended their arms to it, who slapped one another on the back, who watched the snow with blood-red eyes for the first sign of a melting particle, and who became hysterically jubilant when they saw it. Forty-eight hours! Deeper and deeper went the imprints of milder weather upon the high-piled serrations of white, at last to cease. The sun had faded on the afternoon of the second day. The thaw stopped. The snowshoes soon carried a new crunching sound that gradually became softer, more m.u.f.fled. For the clouds had come again, the wind had risen with a fiercer bite than ever in it; again the snow was falling. But the grim little army of rescuers, plodding from one ranchhouse to another, had less of worriment in their features now,--even though the situation was no less tense, no less dangerous. At least the meager stores of the small merchandise establishment in Tabernacle could be distributed with more ease; a two-inch crust of snow had formed over the main snowfall, permitting small sleds to be pulled behind struggling men; the world beneath had been frozen in, to give place to a new one above. And with that:

"It's open! It's open!" The shout came from the lips of the telegrapher, waving his arms as he ran from the tunnel that led to the stationhouse. "It's open! I've had Rawlins on the wire!"

Men crowded about him and thumped into the little box car to listen, like children, to the rattling of the telegraph key,--as though they never had heard one before. So soon does civilization feel the need of its inventions, once they are taken away; so soon does the mind become primitive, once the rest of the world has been shut away from it.