Standing behind him, Glover, with a hand on a roof-brace, steadied himself. In spite of the comforts he had arranged for her, Gertrude, in her corner, felt a lonely sense of being in the way. In her father's car there was never lacking the waiting deference of trainmen; in the cab the men did not even see her.
In the seclusion of the car a storm hardly made itself felt; in the cab she seemed under the open sky. The wind buffeted the glass at her side, rattled in its teeth the door in front of her, drank the steaming flame from the stack monstrously, and dashed the cinders upon the thin roof above her head with terrifying force. With the gathering speed of the engine the cracking exhaust ran into a confusing din that deafened her, and she was shaken and jolted. The plunging of the cab grew violent, and with every lurch her cushion shifted alarmingly. She resented Glover's placing himself so far away, and could not see that he even looked toward her. The furnace door slammed until she thought the fireman must have thrown in coal enough to last till morning, but unable to realize the danger of overloading the fire he stopped only long enough to turn various valve-wheels about her feet, and with his back bent resumed his hammering and shovelling as if his very salvation were at stake: so, indeed, that night it was.
Gertrude watched his unremitting toil; his shifty balancing on his footing with ever-growing amazement, but the others gave it not the slightest heed. The engineer looked only ahead, and Glover's face behind him never turned. Then Gertrude for the first time looked through her own sash out into the storm.
Strain as she would, her vision could pierce to nothing beyond the ceaseless sweep of the thin, wild snow across the brilliant flow of the headlight. She looked into the white whirl until her eyes tired, then back to the cab, at the flying shovel of the fireman, the peaked cap of the muffled engineer—at Glover behind him, his hand resting now on the reverse lever hooked high at his elbow. But some fascination drew her eyes always back to that bright circle in the front—to the sinister snow retreating always and always advancing; flowing always into the headlight and out, and above it darkening into the fire that streamed from the dripping stack. A sudden lurch nearly threw her from her seat, and she gave a little scream as the engine righted. Glover beside her like thought caught her outstretched hand. "A curve," he said, bending apologetically toward her ear as she reseated herself. "Is it very trying?"
"No, except that I am in continual fear of falling from my seat—or having to embrace the unfortunate fireman. Oh!" she exclaimed, putting her wrist on Glover's arm as the cab jerked.
"If I could keep out of the fireman's way, I should stand here," he said.
"There is room on the seat here, I think, if you have not wholly deserted me. Oh!"
"I didn't mean to desert you. It is because the snow is packing harder that you are rocked more; the cab has really been riding very smoothly."
She moved forward on the box. "Are you going to sit down?"
"Thank you."