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Updated: August 19, 2024
Festing sent half the men to cut this portion away, and the others up the hill to haul posts for the snowshed to the top of the slides. It was obvious that a very heavy weight rested on the buried work, but the pressure was uniform, unlike the jarring of a train, and he did not feel disturbed.
Where it ran past tall crags and between the trees, the snow was dry and loose as dust. They made something over two miles in the first hour and soon afterwards came to the mouth of a snowshed. The opening made a dark blotch on the glittering slope, for the roof was pitched at a very small angle to the declivity and the snow passed down hill over it with scarcely a wrinkle.
I sat up at last, and found we were grading slowly downward through a long snowshed; and suddenly we shot into an open; and before we were swallowed into the next length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse of a huge pine-forested ravine upon my left, a foaming river, and a sky already coloured with the fires of dawn.
They were within the snowshed now, the auger boring and tearing and snarling like some savage, vengeful thing against the solid mass of frigidity which faced it.
I sat up at last, and found we were grading slowly downward through a long snowshed; and suddenly we shot into an open; and before we were swallowed into the next length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse of a huge pine-forested ravine upon my left, a foaming river and a sky already coloured with the fires of dawn.
It surged forward. Gray light broke through at the end of the tunnel. The grip of at least one snowshed was broken; but there remained twenty more and the Death Trail beyond! "That's the baby I'm afraid of!" Old Andy was talking as they went toward the cars, the relief day crew passing them on the way. "We can whip these sheds. But that there Death Trail there's a million tons of snow above it!
Ba'tiste broke in excitedly. "By to-morrow morning, ever' snowshed, he will be bank-full of snow. The track, he will be four inches in ice. Six week this country, he can not stand it! Tell him so on the telegraph! Tell him the cattle, he will starve! Peuff! No longer do I think of our machinery! Eef it is los' we are los'. But let eet go. Say to heem nothing of that.
"You can make it all right walking if you keep to the track and watch out you don't meet the construction train in the snowshed." Foster, who knew he would find waiting tedious, went back to the car for his small bag, after which he and Pete set off for the hotel.
The wind had ceased temporarily, allowing every possible workman to be pulled from the ordinary task of keeping the tracks clear of the "pick-ups" of the wind, blowing the snow down from the drifts of the hill, and to be concentrated upon the primary task of many, the clearing of the packed sittings which filled the first snowshed.
And the men shouted, and screamed and beat at one another in their frenzy of happiness, in spite of the fact that the track had been torn away from behind them as though it never had existed, and that they now were cut off entirely from the rest of the world. Only one snowshed remained, with but a feeble bulwark of drifts before it.
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