Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/336

 "Don't you fret!" Neifkins interrupted impatiently. "You've worried until you're all worked up over somethin' that hasn't happened and ain't goin' to."

With this assurance, which left no comfort in its wake, Neifkins went out where the first icy blast of the predicted blizzard lifted his hat and whisked it down the street.

The wind completed what the heavy snow had failed to do. Telephone and telegraph poles lay prone for a quarter of a mile at a stretch. It piled in drifts the snow already fallen and brought more. The blizzard enveloped Prouty until it required something more than normal courage to venture out of doors. It was the courage of desperation which ultimately sent Neifkins out in an attempt to get hay to his sheep. There was small resemblance between the optimist who had assured Wentz so confidently that everything would be all right and the perspiring and all but exhausted Neifkins who wallowed in snow to his arm-pits in an effort to break trail for the four-horse team whose driver was displaying increasing reluctance to go on with the load of baled hay stalled some mile and a half from town.

"We might as well quit," the driver called with a kind of desperate decision in his tone as he made to lay down the reins. "I can't afford to pull the life out of my horses like I got to do to make even a third of the way to-day."

Dismayed by his threat to go back, Neifkins begged:

"Don't quit me like this. I got six thousand sheep that'll starve if we don't git this hay through."

The driver hesitated. Reluctantly he picked up the lines:

"I'll give it another go, but I'm sure It's no use. The horses have pulled every pound that's in 'em, and now this wheeler's discouraged and startin' to balk. Besides,