But the north played a wearing game, and strove to harry us out with suspense before thundering down upon us with her cold and her storm. The change took place slowly. In a day we could hardly feel it, in a week something intangible and subtle, something which could not be defined, had crept into our lives. We felt the change, but could not localise it. Our spirits sank under the uncertainty of the waiting days, but still the wild held her hand. The bells of the heather hung from their stems languidly and motionless, stripped of all their summer charm, but lacking little of the hue of summer. Even yet the foam-flecked waters dropped over the cliffs silently as figures that move in a dream. When we gathered together and ate our midday meal, we wrapped our coats around our shoulders, whereas before we had sat down without them. When night came on we drew nearer to the hot-plate, and when we turned naked into bed we found that the blankets were colder than usual. Only thus did the change affect us for a while. Then the cold snap came suddenly and wildly.
The plaintive sunset waned into a sickly haze one evening, and when the night slipped upwards to the mountain peaks never a star came out into the vastness of the high heavens. Next morning we had to thaw the door of our shack out of the muck into which it was frozen during the night. Outside the snow had fallen heavily on the ground, and the virgin granaries of winter had been emptied on the face of the world.
Unkempt, ragged, and dispirited, we slunk to our toil, the snow falling on our shoulders and forcing its way insistently through our worn and battered bluchers. The cuttings were full of slush to the brim, and we had to grope through them with our hands until we found the jumpers and hammers at the bottom. These we held under our coats until the heat of our bodies warmed them, then we went on with our toil.
At intervals during the day the winds of the mountain put their heads together and swept a whirlstorm of snow down upon us, wetting each man to the pelt. Our tools froze until the hands that gripped them were scarred as if by red-hot spits. We shook uncertain over our toil, our sodden clothes scalding and itching the skin with every movement of the swinging hammers. Near at hand the lean derrick jibs whirled on their pivots like spectres of some ghoulish carnival, and the muck-barrows crunched backwards and forwards, all their dirt and rust hidden in woolly mantles of snow. Hither and thither the little black figures of the workers moved across the waste of whiteness like shadows on a lime-washed wall. Their breath steamed out on the air and disappeared in space like the evanescent and fragile vapour of frying mushrooms.
"On a day like this a man could hardly keep warm on the red-hot hearth of hell!" Moleskin remarked at one time, when the snow whirled around the cutting, causing us to gasp with every fiercely-taken breath.
"Ye'll have a heat on the same hearthstone some day," answered Red Billy, who held a broken lath in one mittened hand, while he whittled away with his eternal clasp-knife.
When night came on we crouched around the hot-plate and told stories of bygone winters, when men dropped frozen stiff in the trenches where they laboured. A few tried to gamble near the door, but the wind that cut through the chinks of the walls chased them to the fire. Moleskin told the story of his first meeting with me on the Paisley toll-road, and suddenly I realised that I was growing old. It was now some years since that meeting took place, and even then I was a man, unaided and alone, fighting the great struggle of existence. I capped Moleskin's story with the account of Mick Deehan's death on the six-foot way. Afterwards the men talked loudly of many adventures. Long lonely shifts were spoken of, nights and days when the sweat turned to ice on the eyelashes, when the cold nipped to the bone and chilled the workers at their labours. One man slipped off the snow-covered gang-plank and fell like a rock forty feet through space.
"Flattened out like a jelly-fish on the groun' he was," said Clancy, who told the story.
Red Billy, who worked on the railway line in his younger days, gave an account of Mick Cassidy's death. Mick was sent out to free the ice-locked facing points, and when they were closed by the signalman, Cassidy's hand got wedged between the blades and the rail.