The three big brothers were in the attic overhead, huddled close about the warm stovepipe that came up through the floor, with the dogs at their backs. It was dusk there, too, for the western gable window, broken the evening before by the force of the storm, was nailed tight from within and piled high from without; while the window in the opposite end of the house was intact, but veiled with frost and hung with icicles. The week's washing, swinging under the peaked roof on a long, sagging clothes-line, added further to the gloom. Stiff and specter-like, it moved gently in the currents of air that blew down from the bare, slanting rafters, each garment taking on a fantastic shape of its own. Near the pipe hung the stockings of the family, limp and steaming in the twilight.
The biggest brother had been reading aloud to the other two; but, as the light grew less, he threw the paper-bound book aside, and they began to talk in subdued tones. Below them, they could hear the neighbor woman walking back and forth, and the popping of the kernels in the stove; behind them, the dogs slept; and from above came faint sounds of the storm.
Outside, night was coming on fast—the early night of a stormy day. The neighbor woman, noting the increasing darkness in the sitting-room, lighted a tall kerosene lamp and set it on the clock-shelf near a south window. The lower windows to the west were closed and sightless, so no beacon could shine from them; but she hoped that the lamp's feeble rays, piercing the unscreened top panes of the south window, might by chance catch the eye of the husband were he striving to return.
With increasing darkness, the blizzard grew in strength and fury. It loosened a clapboard below the east gable, and shrieked through the partial opening. It rattled the window, and tore at the heavy planks on the roof that supported the stovepipe. It blew the snow from the cracks and whistled through them shrilly. It caught the house in its drifts and shook it.
The dogs, awakened by the screeching and clash of things, crouched in fright against their masters. Shepherd, pointer, and Indian dogs trembled when the wind moaned, and answered every whine from without with another. The St. Bernard, separating himself from the pack, sprang at a bound to the boarded-up window and, raising his head, uttered long, dismal howls. The big brothers hastened to quiet him, and spared neither foot nor fist; but the dog, eluding them, returned again and again to the window, and mourned with his muzzle to the west.
It was while the hurricane was thus raging over the farm-house, and when nothing but a bit of south roof and the tops of the cottonwoods showed that a habitation was there, that the stork alighted.
The big brothers were drowsing in the dark about the pipe, with the pack whimpering beside them, and did not know of his coming until, in a sudden lull, there came up through the open trap-door that led to the sitting-room stairs a small, clear, hailing cry.
It sounded but for an instant. Then the storm broke again, the windows rattled, the dogs whined, the sleet-charged air boomed and thundered and sucked at the quivering house, and darkness, ever blacker and more terrible, settled down.
When the neighbor woman came softly up and put her head above the trap-door, she had to call again and again into the gloom, through which the lines of frozen clothes waved faint and ghost-like, before the big brothers awoke and, rising from their cramped positions, groped their way sleepily to the stairs and followed her down. As they reached the sitting-room and stood in a silent, waiting row by the stove, the dogs about them, the neighbor woman tiptoed to the canopied bed in the corner and took up a tiny bundle, which she brought back and laid in the arms of the biggest brother.