United States or Denmark ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Midnight found him in a shack buried in snow and reached only by a circuitous tunnel, a shack where men no longer Americans, but black-smeared, red-eyed, doddering, stumbling human machines came and went, their frost-caked Mackinaws steaming as they clustered about the red-hot stove, their faces smudged with engine grease to form a coating against the stinging blast of the ice-laden wind, their cheeks raw and bleeding, their mouths swollen orifices which parted only for mumblings; vikings of another age, the fighters of the ice gangs, of which Houston had become a part.
If they could not make good on their contract, the other mill was ever ready to step in. "Eet all depen'," said Ba'tiste more than once during the snowy, frost-caked days in which they watched every freight train that pulled, white-coated, over the range into Tabernacle. "Eet all depen' on the future. Mebbe so, we make eet. Mebbe so, we do not. But we gamble, eh, mon Baree?"
The telegrapher, at the frost-caked window, rubbed a spot with his hand and stared into the dimness of the flying snow, toward his station. "Guess I'll have t' call for volunteers if I get in there to-day. We'll have to tunnel." Ba'tiste and Houston joined him. The box car that served as a station house always an object of the heaviest drifts was buried!
Twenty-four hours later, when trains were limping into terminals hours behind time, when call after call was going forth to summon aid for the stricken systems of Missouri, when double-headers, frost-caked wheels churning uselessly, bucked the drifts in a constantly losing battle; when cattle trains were being cut from the schedules, and every wire was loaded with the messages of frantic officials, someone happened to wonder what that big boob Garrity was doing with his snow ploughs.
Word Of The Day