Glover, on the back of the telegram, scrawled a note to Crosby, the
master-mechanic, and turned over not to sleep, but to think--and to
think, not of the work before him, but of her and of her situation. A
roundhouse caller roused him at half-past three with word that the snow
battery was marked up for four o'clock. He rose, dressed deliberately
and carefully for the exposure ahead, and sat down before a candle to
tell Gertrude, in a note, when he hoped to be back.
Locking his trunk when he had done, he snuffed out the candle and
closed his room door behind him. The hall was dark, but he knew its
turns, and the carpeted stairs gave no sound as he walked down. At the
second floor there were two stairways by which he could descend. He
looked up the dim corridor toward where she slept. Somehow he could
not make up his mind to leave without passing her room.
His heavy tread was noiseless, and at her door he paused and put his
hand uncertainly upon the casing. In the darkness his head bent an
instant on his outstretched arm--it had never before been hard to go;
then he turned and walked softly away.
At the breakfast table and at the dinner table the talk was of the
snow. The evening paper contained a column of despatches concerning
the blockade, now serious, in the eighth district. Half the first page
was given to alarming reports from the cattle ranges. Two
mail-carriers were reported lost in the Sweetgrass country, and a ski
runner from Fort Steadman, which had been cut off for eight days, told
of thirty-five feet of snow in the Whitewater hills.
Sleepy Cat reported eighteen inches of fresh snow, and a second delayed
despatch under the same date-line reported that a bucking special from
Medicine Bend, composed of a rotary, a flanger, and five locomotives
had passed that point at 9 A.M. for the eighth district.
Gertrude found no interest in the news or the discussion. She could
only wonder why she did not see Glover during the day, and when he made
no appearance at dinner she grew sick with uncertainty. Leaving the
dining-room ahead of the party in some vague hope of seeing him,
Solomon hurried up with the note that Glover had left to be given her
in the morning. The boy had gone off duty before she left her room and
had over-slept, but instead of waiting for his apologies she hastened
to her room and locked her door to devour her lover's words. She saw
that he had written her in the dead of night to explain his going, and
to say good-by. Bucks' message he had enclosed. "But I shall work
very hard every hour I am gone to get back the sooner," he promised,
"and if you hear of the snow flying over the peaks on the West End you
will know that I am behind it and headed straight for you."