It began to snow on the morning of the twenty-fifth, with an east and northeast wind. 25 The snow came down all day in big flakes, and by evening it was a foot deep. It turned colder in the night, and the wind shifted to the northwest. In the morning it was blizzarding. The air was full of fine snow blown before the wind, and before noon you could not see across the street. Some of the smaller houses were almost drifted under. This kept up for three days. Of course the train could not get through, and the one telegraph wire went down and left the town like an island alone in the middle of the ocean.
The next day after the blizzard stopped it grew warmer and the snow began to melt a little, but it was another four days before the train came. By the time it did come it seemed as if everybody in town was disgusted or frightened enough to leave. When the second train after the blizzard had gone back, there were but thirty-two persons, all told, at Track’s End. Only one of these was a woman, and she it was that was the cause of making me a hotel-keeper on a small scale.
The woman was Mrs. Sours, wife of my employer. One morning, after every one had 26 left the breakfast-table except her husband and myself, she said to me:
“Jud, couldn’t you run the hotel this winter, now that there are only three or four boarders left, and them not important nor particular, only so they get enough to eat?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” I said. “I can run the barn, but I’m afraid I don’t know much about a hotel.”
“Do you hear the boy say he can do it, Henry?” says she, turning to her husband. “Of course he can do it, and do it well, too. He always said his mother taught him how to cook. That means I’m a-going down on the train to-morrow, and not coming back to this wretched country till spring has melted off the snow and made it fit for a decent body to live in.”
“Well, all right,” said Sours. “You may go; Jud and me are good for it.”
“Mercy sakes!” cried Mrs. Sours, “do you suppose I’m going to leave you here to be frozen to death, and starved to death, and killed by the wolves that we already hear howling every night, and murdered by Indians, and shot by Pike and that wretched 27 band of horse-thieves that the Billings sheriffs who stopped here the other night was looking for? No, Henry; when I go I am going to take you with me.”
Sours tried to argue with her a little, but it did no sort of good, and the next day they both went off and I was left in charge of the hotel for the winter with three boarders–Tom Carr, the station agent and telegraph operator; Frank Valentine, the postmaster; and a Norwegian named Andrew, who was to take my place in the barn. Allenham had gone before the blizzard. Some others went on the same train with Mr. Sours and his wife. We were twenty-six, all told, that night.
The weather remained bad, and the train was often late or did not come at all. On the last day of November there were an even fourteen of us left. On the morning of that day week Tom Carr came over from the station and brought word that he had just got a telegram from headquarters saying that for the rest of the winter the train would run to Track’s End but once a week, coming up Wednesday and going back Thursday.