I found that I felt much better about the situation than I had the night before, though, of course, I still wished with all my heart that I was out of it all, and thought every minute what a fool I was to have acted the way I did. But there were so many things to do that I did not have time to worry very much, which I believe was all that kept me from going crazy.
After breakfast I decided that the first thing I had best do was to look up the gun question. I found Sours’s rifle in a closet. It was not loaded, but there was a box of cartridges on a shelf, and I wiped out the barrel and filled the magazine. It was fifteen-shot and forty-five caliber, and seemed like a good gun. I stood it under the counter in the office and out of sight behind an old coat. In the drawer of the desk was a revolver. It was a thirty-eight caliber, and pretty big to carry, but I thought it might be handy to have, so I stuffed it in my pocket.
Taggart’s hardware store was two doors toward the railroad from the hotel, but the sidewalk was so covered with snow, and the 55 wind swept down the street with such fury, that it seemed next to impossible to get there. But I was anxious to see about the weapons, so I went out the back door and crept along close to the rear of the buildings till I reached it.
The door was locked, but I could see through a window that a box had been recently broken open; but, as there were no guns in sight, I concluded that the men had probably carried them over to the depot. I tried to see this through the driving snow, but could not, so I did not dare to start out to find it, knowing how easy it is to become confused and lost in such a storm.
As I stood back of the store I thought once that I heard the whistle of a locomotive; then I knew of course it was only the wind. “It’ll be a long time before you hear any such music as that,” I said to myself. There was nothing which would have sounded quite so good to me.
I was glad to get back to the house, where I could draw a breath of air not full of powdered snow. I spent some time calking up cracks around the windows, where the snow blew in. While I was doing this it suddenly flashed into 56 my mind, what if I should lose track of the days of the month and week? I thought I would write down every day, and got a piece of paper to begin on, when I noticed a calendar behind the desk. I took the pen and scratched off “December 17,” which was gone, and which was the beginning of my life alone in Track’s End; and the first thing every morning after that while I stayed I marked off the day before; and so I never lost my reckoning. Though, indeed, I was soon to wake up in another and worse place than Track’s End; but of this I will tell later. I had very foolishly forgotten to wind the clock the night before, and it had stopped, and I had no watch by which to set it; but I started it, and trusted to find the clock at the depot still going, as it was an eight-day one.
MY FAMILY AND I AT A MEAL, TRACK’S END
I soon found myself hungry, and took it for granted that it was dinner-time. The meals seemed pretty lonesome, because I had been used to having a great deal of fun with Tom Carr and the others at such times, much of it about my poor cooking. Kaiser and Pawsy appeared willing to do what they could to make it pleasant; and this time I put a chair 57 at one end of the little table, and the cat jumped up in it and began to purr like a young tiger, while the dog sat on the floor at the other end and pounded the floor with his tail like any drummer might beat his drum. I also began to get them into the bad practice of eating at the same time I did; but I had to have some company.