Page:The Blind Man's Eyes (July 1916).pdf/62

42 went back to the second sleeper with its single passenger, and he spoke to the Pullman conductor, who nodded and went toward that car. The weather had prevented the expected increase of their number of passengers at Spokane; only a few had got aboard there; there were worse grades ahead, in climbing which every pound of weight would count; so Connery—in the absence of orders and with Jarvis' note in his pocket—had resolved to drop the second sleeper.

At Fracroft—the station where he was to exchange the ordinary plow which so far had sufficed, and couple on the "rotary" to fight the mountain drifts ahead—he swung himself down from the train, looked in at the telegraph office and then went forward to the two giant locomotives, on whose sweating, monstrous backs the snow, suddenly visible in the haze of their lights, melted as it fell. He waited on the station platform while the second sleeper was cut out and the train made up again. Then, as they started, he swung aboard and in the brightly lighted men's compartment of the first Pullman checked up his report-sheets with a stub of pencil. They had stopped again, he noticed; now they were climbing a grade, more easily because of the decrease of weight; now a trestle rumbled under the wheels, telling him just where they were. Next was the powerful, steady push against opposition—the rotary was cutting its way through a drift.

Again they stopped—once more went on. Connery, having put his papers into his pocket, dozed, awoke, dozed again. The snow was certainly heavy, and the storm had piled it up across the cuts in great drifts which kept the rotary struggling almost constantly now. The progress of the train halted again and again; sev-