"I scrubbed everywhere but there, Mam," said Jim Burns, a little sheepishly.
"Everywhere but where the most grease-spots is," Lovina threw up her hands and lapsed again into brooding silence, "that's a man, all over again; so it is."
The last verse of "The Dying Cowboy" was snatched out of the mouths of its singers by a great gust of wind and snow, scattering over the sleigh like a wave breaking over a boat. Ware, concentrated on keeping the sleighful "in good spirits", had for the moment almost forgotten the storm; but now, rudely reminded of it by the bitter, stinging snow-grains that assailed his face and drove deep between scarf and neck, he drew tight the collar of his top-coat and looked up and about.
The blizzard had not yet closed about them. But in the far and hither distance it had thickened, blotting out the sun, that must now be almost at the horizon. Above, one could catch faint passing glimpses of the sky, beneath which the hurricane was throwing a dim-white canopy of upblown snow. About and about, the prairie and the air were a uniform quivering white. For perhaps a quarter-mile radius, one could still see definitely the drifts and the half-buried willow and poplar scrub; but beyond this the storm had built a superstructure, that was in opacity like a wall, but bellied and blew like a curtain under the huge inconstant impulse of the gale. Only in one respect was the motion of this rampart steady and uniform. That was in respect to its gradual, sure, terrific closing-in about the sleigh and its human handful. Ware, watching it fascinated, thought of the cell in the famous tale of "The Pit and the Pendulum", with its contracting circular wall that precipitated the prisoner into a central abyss.
No abyss yawned beneath the feet of the laboring horses nor the runners of the creaking, inching sleigh. But that road they trod was like the narrow path over a morass: all about it the footing was soft, deep, delaying. If iron-shod hoof or steel-shod runner slipped, it meant loss of time, lowering of precious bodily heat, fatigue, failing of the heart—all preparations for that slowing-down of the restless body-molecules to the final stoppage which should mark the cold triumph of the frost:
"And here and there, in drifts of snow—"
"Ugh!" said Ware, humorously.
But there was nothing comic in that nearing wall, whose base crept over the drifts like the edge of a tide at flow.
It might have been midnight, or a little before, when the Galician girl whose function it had been to keep the fire going in the Nixon farmhouse stove, saw a face move by the window outside, on the way to the door. Mary had plenty of time to see it, for the face moved very slowly beyond the frost-edged pane; and she noted that it was not the face of John Nixon, with his corduroy cap, nor the red face under a "dogskin" cap, of Jim Burns. Nor was the knock, which presently sounded faint and erratic on the door-panel—like the chance rap of a frozen branch on a window—recognizable as that of anybody she knew.
She was a little afraid, as she listened to that rap which sounded as though the visitor were half-asleep; but Mary knew enough about the northwest not to keep a man standing outside on a night like this, no matter who he might be. Accordingly, she ran and opened the door.