CHAPTER XXIII
IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT
While Kusiak slept that night the wind shifted. It came roaring across the range and drove before it great scudding clouds heavily laden with sleety snow. The howling storm snuffed out the moonlight as if it had been a tallow dip and fought and screamed around the peaks, whirling down the gulches with the fury of a blizzard.
From dark till dawn the roar of the wind filled the night. Before morning heavy drifts had wiped out the roads and sheeted the town in virgin white unbroken by trails or furrows.
With the coming of daylight the tempest abated. Kusiak got into its working clothes and dug itself out from the heavy blanket of white that had tucked it in. By noon the business of the town was under way again. That which would have demoralized the activities of a Southern city made little difference to these Arctic Circle dwellers. Roads were cleared, paths shoveled, stores opened. Children in parkas and fur coats trooped to school and studied through the short afternoon by the aid of electric light.
Dusk fell early and with it came a scatter of more snow. Mrs. Selfridge gave a dinner-dance at the club that night and her guests came in furs of great variety and much value. The hostess outdid herself to make the affair the most elaborate of the season. Wally had brought the favors in from Seattle and also the wines. Nobody in Kusiak of any social importance was omitted from the list of invited except Gordon Elliot. Even the grumpy old cashier of Macdonald's bank—an old bachelor who lived by himself in rooms behind those in which the banking was done—was persuaded to break his custom and appear in a rusty old dress suit of the vintage of '95.
The grizzled cashier—his name was Robert Milton—left the clubhouse early for his rooms. It was snowing, but the wind had died down. Contrary to his custom, he had taken two or three glasses of wine. His brain was excited so that he knew he could not sleep. He decided to read "Don Quixote" by the stove for an hour or two. The heat and the reading together would make him drowsy.
Arrived at the bank, he let himself into his rooms and locked the door. He stooped to open the draft of the stove when a sound stopped him halfway. The cashier stood rigid, still crouched, waiting for a repetition of the noise. It came once more—the low, dull rasping of a file.
Shivers ran down the spine of Milton and up the back of his head to the roots of his hair. Somebody was in the bank—at two o'clock in the morning—with tools for burglary. He was a scholarly old fellow, brought up in New England and cast out to the uttermost frontier by the malign tragedy of poverty. Adventure offered no appeal to him. His soul quaked as he waited with slack, feeble muscles upon the discovery that only a locked door stood between him and violent ruffians.