The White Desert

by Courtney Ryley Cooper

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 passed 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 muffled, 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 assemble 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 assembled 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, shaggy 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, muffled 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 altitude 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 destitute. 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 muffled. 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. Eagerly they clustered there, staring with anxious eyes toward the operator as he hammered at the key, talking in whispers lest they disturb him, waiting for his interpretation of the message, like worshippers waiting for the word of an oracle.

"I'm putting it all on the wire!" he announced at last, with feverish intensity. "I'm telling 'em just how it is over here. Maybe they can do something—from Rawlins."

"Rawlins?" Houston had edged forward. "There's not a chance. It's hundreds of miles away; they can't use horses, and they certainly can't walk. Wait—will you give me a chance at something?"

A gleam had come into his eyes. His hands twisted nervously. Voices mumbled about him; suddenly the great hands of Ba'tiste grasped him by the shoulders and literally tossed him toward the telegrapher.

"Ah, oui! If eet is the idea—then speak it."

"Go on—" the telegrapher had stopped his key for a moment—"I'll put it through, if it'll help."

"All right. Get Denver on the wire. Then take this message to every newspaper in the city:

"'Can't you help us? Please try to start campaign to force Crestline Road to open the Pass. Women and children are starving here. We have been cut off from the rest of the world for two weeks. We need food—and coal. Road will not be open for four or five weeks more under ordinary circumstances. This will mean death to many of us here, the wiping out of a great timber and agricultural country, and a blot on the history of Colorado. Help us—and we will not forget it."

"'THE CITIZENS OF THE WEST COUNTRY.'"

"Ah, oui!" Old Ba'tiste was addressing the rest of the crowd. "The newspapers, they can help, better than any one else. Eet is our chance. Bon—good! Mon Baree, he have the big, what-you-say, sentiment."

"Sounds good." The telegrapher was busily putting it on the wire. Then a wait of hours,—hours in which the operator varied his routine by sending the word of the stricken country to Cheyenne, to Colorado Springs, to Pueblo, and thence, through the news agencies, to the rest of the world.

"Might as well get everybody in on it," he mused, as he pounded the telegraph instrument; "can't tell—some of those higher-ups might be in New York and think there wasn't anything to it unless they could see it in the New York papers. I—" Then he stopped as the wire cut under his finger and clattered forth a message. He jumped. He grasped Ba'tiste in his lank arms, then turned beaming to the rest of the gaping crowd.

"It's from the papers in Denver!" he shouted. "A joint message. They've taken up the fight!"

A fight which had its echoes in the little railroad box car, the center of the deadened, shrouded West Country, the news of which must travel to Cheyenne, to Rawlins, thence far down through the northern country over illy patched telegraph wires before it reached the place for which it was intended, the box car and its men who came and went, eager for the slightest word from the far-away, yet grudging of their time, lest darkness still find them in the snows, and night come upon them struggling to reach the little town and send them into wandering, aimless journeys that might end in death. For the snows still swirled, the storms still came and went, the red ball of the sun still refused to come forth in its beaming strength. And it was during this period of uncertainty that Houston met Ba'tiste Renaud, returning from a cruising expedition far in the lake region, to find him raging, his fists clenched, his eyes blazing.

"Is eet that the world is all unjust?" he roared, as he faced Houston. "Is eet that some of us do our part, while others store up for emergency? Eh? Bah! I am the mad enough to tear them apart!"

"Who? What's gone wrong?"

"I am the mad! You have no seen the M'sieu Thayer during all the storm?"

"No."

"Nor the M'sieu Blackburn? Nor the men who work for them. Eh? You have no seen them?"

"No, not once."

"Ah! I pass to-day the Blackburn mill. They have shovel out about the sawshed. They have the saw going,—they keep at work, when there are the women and the babies who starve, when there are the cattle who are dying, when there is the country that is like a broken thing. But they work—for themself! They saw the log into the tie—they work from the piles of timber which they have about the sawmill, to store up the supply. They know that we do not get our machinery! They have think they have a chance—for the contract!"

It brought Houston to a sharp knowledge of conditions. They had given, that the rest of the country might not suffer. Their enemies had worked on, fired with the new hope that the road over the mountains would not be opened; that the machinery so necessary to the carrying out of Houston's contract would not arrive in time to be of aid. For without the ability to carry out the first necessities of that agreement, the rest must surely and certainly fail. Long before, Houston had realized the danger that the storm meant; there had been no emergency clause in the contract. Now his hands clenched, his teeth gritted.

"It almost seems that there's a premium on being crooked, Ba'tiste," came at last. "It—"

Then he ceased. A shout had come from the distance. Faintly through the sifting snow they could see figures running. Then the words came,—faint, far-away, shrill shouts forcing their way through the veil of the storm.

"They're going to open the road! They're going to open the road!"

Here, there and back again it came, men calling to men, the few women of the little settlement braving the storm that they too might add to the gladful cry. Already, according to the telegram, snow-fighting machinery and men were being assembled in Denver for the first spurt toward Tollifer, and from there through the drifts and slides of the hills toward Crestline. Ba'tiste and Houston were running now, as fast as their snowshoes would allow, oblivious for once of the cut of the wind and the icy particles of its frigid breath.

"They open the road!" boomed Ba'tiste in chorus with the rest of the little town. "Ah, oui! They open the road. The Crestline Railroad, he have a heart after all, he have a—"

"Any old time!" It was a message bearer coming from the shack of a station. "They're not going to do it—it's the M. P. & S. L."

"Through the tunnel?"

"No. Over the hill. According to the message, the papers hammered the stuffing out of the Crestline road. But you've got to admit that they haven't got either the motive power or the money. The other road saw a great chance to step in and make itself solid with this country over here. It's lending the men and the rolling stock. They're going to open another fellow's road, for the publicity and the good will that's in it."

A grin came to Houston's lips,—the first one in weeks. He banged Ba'tiste on his heavily wadded shoulder.

"That's the kind of railroad to work for!"

"Ah, oui! And when eet come through—ah, we shall help to build it."

Two pictures flashed across Houston's brain; one of a snowy sawmill with the force working day and night, when all the surrounding country cried for help, working toward its selfish ends that it might have a supply of necessary lumber in case a more humane organization should fail; another of carload after carload of necessary machinery, snow-covered, ice-bound, on a sidetrack at Tollifer, with the whole, horrible, snow-clutched fierceness of the Continental Divide between it and its goal.

"I hope so!" he exclaimed fervently. "I hope so!"

Then, swept along by hurrying forms, they went on toward the station house, there to receive the confirmation of the glad news, to shout until their throats were raw, and then, still with their duties before them, radiate once more on their missions of mercy. For the announcement of intention was no accomplishment. It was one thing for the snowplows and the gangs and tremendous engines of the M. P. & S. L. to attempt to open the road over the divide. But it was quite another thing to do it!

All that day Houston thought of it, dreamed of it, tried to visualize it,—the fight of a railroad against the snows of the hills. He wondered how the snowplows would work, how they would break through the long, black snowsheds, now crammed with the thing which they had been built to resist. He thought of the laborers; and his breath pulled sharply. Would they have enough men? It would be grueling work up there, terrific work; would there be sufficient laborers who would be willing to undergo the hardships for the money they received? Would—

In the night he awoke, again thinking of it. Every possible hand that could swing a pick or jam a crowbar against grudging ice would be needed up there. Every pair of shoulders willing to assume the burdens of a horrible existence that others might live would be welcomed. A mad desire began to come over him; a strange, impelling scheme took hold of his brain. They would need men,—men who would not be afraid, men who would be willing to slave day and night if necessary to the success of the adventure. And who should be more willing than he? His future, his life, his chance of success, where now was failure, lay at Tollifer. His hands would be more than eager! His muscles more than glad to ache with the fatigue of manual labor! Long before dawn he rose and scribbled a note in the dim light of the old kerosene lamp in the makeshift lobby, a note to Ba'tiste Renaud:

"I'm going over the range. I can't wait. They may need me. I'm writing this, because you would try to dissuade me if I told you personally. Don't be afraid for me—I'll make it somehow. I've got to go. It's easier than standing by.

"HOUSTON."

Then, his snowshoes affixed, he went out into the night. The stars were shining dimly, and Houston noticed them with an air of thankfulness as he took the trail of the telephone poles and started toward the faint outline of the mountains in the distance. It would make things easier; but an hour later, as he looked for a dawn that did not come, he realized that it had been only a jest of the night. The storm clouds were thick on the sky again, the snow was dashing about him once more; half-blindly, gropingly, he sought to force his way from one pole to another,—in vain.

He measured his steps, and stopping, looked about him. He had traveled the distance from one pole to another, yet in the sweep of the darting sheet of white he could discern no landmark, nothing to guide him farther on his journey. He floundered aimlessly, striving by short sallies to recover the path from which the storm had taken him, but all to no purpose. If dawn would only come!

Again and again, hardly realizing the dangers to which he was subjecting himself, Houston sought to regain his lost sense of direction. Once faintly, in the far-away, as the storm lifted for a moment, he thought that he glimpsed a pole and hurried toward it with new hope, only to find it a stalwart trunk of a dead tree, rearing itself above the mound-like drifts. Discouraged, half-beaten, he tried again, only to wander farther than ever from the trail. Dawn found him at last, floundering hopelessly in snow-screened woods, going on toward he knew not where.

A half-hour, then he stopped. Fifty feet away, almost covered by the changing snows, a small cabin showed faintly, as though struggling to free itself from the bonds of white, and Houston turned toward it eagerly. His numbed hands banged at the door, but there came no answer. He shouted; still no sound came from within, and he turned the creaking, protesting knob.

The door yielded, and climbing over the pile of snow at the step, Houston guided his snowshoes through the narrow door, blinking in the half-light in an effort to see about him. There was a stove, but the fire was dead. At the one little window, the curtain was drawn tight and pinned at the sides to the sash. There was a bed—and the form of some one beneath the covers. Houston called again, but still there came no answer. He turned to the window, and ripping the shade from its fastenings, once more sought the bed, to bend over and to stare in dazed, bewildered fashion, as though in a dream. He was looking into the drawn, haggard features of an unconscious woman, the eyes half-open, yet unseeing, one emaciated hand grasped about something that was shielded by the covers. Houston forced himself even closer. He touched the hand. He called:

"Agnes!"

The eyelids moved slightly; it was the only evidence of life, save the labored, irregular breathing. Then the hand moved, clutchingly. Slowly, tremblingly, Houston turned back an edge of the blankets,—and stood aghast.

On her breast was a baby—dead!