“We had scarcely done this,” resumed Doyle, “and were shivering over the fire, when a heavy gust of wind again burst open the shutters as easy as if they had never been fastened at all. We sprang to our feet. After a hard tussle we again secured the windows by nailing a cleat to the floor, against which we fixed one end of a board, using the other end as a lever. You understand?” I nodded. “Well, even then it was all we could do to force the shutters back into place. But we did it. We had to do it.
“The rest of the night was passed in momentary expectation that the building would be blown over into Tuckerman’s Ravine, and we with it. At four in the morning the wind registered one hundred and eighty-six miles. It had shifted then from east to north-east. From this time it steadily fell to ten miles at nine o’clock—as calm as a daisy. This was the heaviest blow ever experienced on the mountain.”
“Suppose this house had gone, and the hotel stood fast, could you have effected an entrance into the hotel?” I asked.
“No, indeed. We could not have faced the wind.”
“Not for a hundred feet, and in a matter of life and death?”
“In that gale? We should have been lifted clean off our feet and smashed upon the rocks like this bottle,” flinging one out at the door.
“So then for all those hours you expected from one moment to another to be swept into eternity?”
“We did what we could. Each of us wrapped himself up in blankets and quilts, tying these tightly around him with ropes, to which were attached bars of iron, so that if the house went by the board we might stand a chance—a slim one—of anchoring, somehow, somewhere.”
I tried to make him admit that he was afraid; but he would not. Only he forgot, he said, in the excitement of that terrible night, that he was ill, until the danger was over.