"Was you ever out in a blizzard?" said John Nixon, suddenly: as though the thought, like that of a group of castaways in an open boat under squall-clouds, had become by sympathy communal. "No? Well, you're a-goin' to be out in one to-night, English—"
"Come, come, now, old chap," reminded Ware, "no national imputations, remember. I thought it was to be 'Bill'—wasn't it?"
"Well, Bill," conceded Nixon, "as I was about to say, you're goin' to be out to-night in the finest whoopin' he-blizzard since '97. I can smell her a-comin'—all through me."
From the sleigh—which now, with the village in the distance behind and a wholly roofless horizon-line before, was the sole, small centre of life and companionship in the midst of a snowy waste—Ware looked across the drifts toward the west, where the sun of the short, late-November afternoon was trending low. The trail ran almost due north, to where the white line of the horizon met the pale blue of that part of the sky distant from the transfiguring sun. Between these two cardinal points—north and west—the voice of winter megaphoned from northwestward that bitter weather was at hand.
The distant groves roared softly, like surf heard against the wind. Afar, the sound had the similitude of hoarse, enormous exhalation; near at hand, it was like the wash and hiss of water. The whole surface of the prairie that had been fixed and frozen, now took on an aspect of life, of ceaseless scintillation and quivering like ripples in the sun. Ware, looking along the bright faces of the drifts, saw that this phenomenon was caused by multitudinous lines of hurrying snow-grains, serpentining over those white billows in the track of the wind, building with a wondrous rapidity little ribs and ridges of snow in the lee of every bump and projection in their path.
In the early afternoon, it had been warm, even to thawing-point. But now, as the wind rose, it shuttled with a sharp cold the woof of the air. Earlier, the air had been clear and speckless as the void above quiet water, and bland in its touch upon the skin. Now, it was clouded with gathering snow-atoms, hard as sand, whose impact upon face and hands was needle-sharp and whose irritation of the eyeballs blinded the vision with rheum. Earlier, the sky had been bright-blue from horizon to zenith. Now, it was half-fogged with a kind of smoke-blue mist, that was nothing other than the first draft of a trillion-atomed host of snow-motes drawn up to their unfriendly function by the cold whirlwind that should general their attack upon the prairie's winter peace.
The blizzard is like, and yet contrary to, the thunderstorm that is the crowning phenomenon of summer. It is like, in that it is preceded by a "weather-breeding" twelve hours or so of undue heat; it is like, in the effect of its attack; it is like, in its whipping of the outcast, its lashing of the earth; it is somewhat like in its roar, although there is no thunder to diapason the storm of mid-winter. But it is contrary in color, and in duration, and in direction—or rather, lack of direction. For the color of a blizzard is not a definite black, but a blinding white; its duration is not a few moments, but long hours of terrific, unabated wind-energy; its direction is everywhere—that is to say, you can turn your back to a thunderstorm, but you cannot turn your back to a blizzard. If you face to windward, you get the volley of the "spindrift" direct; if you face leeward, you get it round a corner, just as stingingly. To the wanderer, a blizzard is a succession of intersecting whirlwinds, not a direct blast from a definite point in the compass.
Sir William Ware, in this sleigh that was inching its course—at least, so it seemed—across the long ten miles that separated Toddburn village from the Nixon farm, felt an odd sense of dependence as he watched the gathering of the storm. There was in his whole fine body and brain no fibre of fear, as far as personal danger was concerned—for, besides the heritage of his family and race, he was too much the philosopher to regard the chance of death with anything but curiosity. But he felt awed by the cold, the great white vastness, the thrilling mighty wind—not yet at anything like its crescendo, either—and the feeling that his sole link with safety, this bluff Canadian pioneer who held the destiny of that sleighful in his rough-mittened hands that held the horses' reins and his wonderful, but not infallible, pioneer's sense of direction, was plainly a bit anxious in spite of all his experience.
"Suppose we have a song, old chap," he leaned forward and shouted in Nixon's ear; "start up something you know, and we'll all join in the chorus."
But John Nixon shook a diffident head. "I got all I can do, handlin' the team, Bill," he said—in his Canadian way avoiding by the excuse the admission that he could not sing. "Try Jim, here—he's the singin' bird out on our ranch. Let's have that there about the 'Mistle-tree Bough', Jim—you ain't got nothin' on your mind just now."