Not until I heard this did I realize that we were still standing on the steps, our clothes congealing about us, peering through the now dense gloom ahead, as if for the apparition of some other grisly foe to daunt or drive us back.
We went in, and sat down by the roaring fire, in spite of which a chill pervaded the car. We were now running over the divide between the valley we had just left and that of Elk Fork. Up here on the highlands the wind more than ever roared and clutched at the corners of the car, and sometimes, as with the palm of a great hand, pressed us over, as if a giant were striving to overturn us. We could hear the engine struggling with the savage norther, like a runner breathing hard, as he nears exhaustion. Presently I noticed fine particles of snow, driven into the car at the crevices, falling on my hands and face, and striking the hot stove with little hissing explosions of steam.
“We’re running into a blizzard up here,” said Corcoran. “It’s a terror outside.”
“A terror; yes,” said Jim. “What sort of time are we making?”
“Just about holding our own,” said Corcoran. “Not much to spare. Got to stop at Barslow for water. But there won’t be any bad track from there on. This snow won’t cut any figure for three hours yet, and mebbe not at all, there’s so little of it.”
“Kittrick has been asking for an appropriation to rebuild the Elk Fork trestle,” said Jim. “Will it stand this flood?”
“Well,” said Corcoran, “if the water ain’t too high, and the ice don’t run too swift in the Fork, it’ll be all right. But if there’s any such mixture of downpour and thaw as there was along the Creek back there, we may have to jump across a gap. It’ll probably be all right.”
I remembered the Elk Fork, and the trestle just on the hither side of the Junction. I remembered the valley, green with trees, and populous with herds, winding down to the lake, and the pretty little town of Josephine. I remembered that gala day when we christened it. I groaned in spirit, as I thought of finding the trestle gone, after our hundred-and-fifty-mile dash through storm and flood. Yet I believed it would be gone. The blows showered upon us had beaten down my courage. I felt no shrinking from either struggle or danger; but this was merely the impulse which impels the soldier to fight on in despair, and sell his life dearly. I believed that ruin fronted us all; that our great system of enterprises was going down; that, East and West, where we had been so much courted and admired, we should become a by-word and a hissing. The elements were struggling against us. That vengeful flood had snatched at us, and barely missed; the ruthless hurricane was holding us back; and somehow fate would yet find means to lay us low. I had all day kept thinking of the lines:
“Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight
Like this last dim, weird battle of the west.
A death-white mist slept over land and sea:
Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew
Down to his blood, till all his heat was cold
With formless fear: and even on Arthur fell
Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought.”
And this, thought I, was the end of the undertaking upon which we had entered so lightly, with frolic jests of piracy and Spanish galleons and pieces-of-eight, and with all that mock-seriousness with which we discussed hypnotic suggestion and psychic force! The bitterness grew sickening, as Corcoran, hearing the long whistle of the engine, said that we were coming into Barslow. The tragic foolery of giving that name to any place!