visible. The tiny mounds in the villages of the prairie-dogs seemed
blocked and frozen; even the trusty sentinel had "deserted post" and
huddled with his fellows for warmth and shelter in the bowels of the
earth. Fluttering owl and skulking coyote, too, had vanished from the
face of nature. Timid antelope--fleetest coursers of the prairie--and
stolid horned cattle had gone, none knew whither, nor cared to know
until the "blizzard" had subsided. Two heavy engines fought their way,
panting, into the very teeth of the gale and slowly wound the long train
after them up-grade among the foot-hills of the great plateau of the
Rockies. Once in a while, when stopping for a moment at some group of
brown-painted sheds and earth-battened shanties, the wind moaned and
howled among the iron braces and brake-chains beneath the car and made
such mournful noise that it was a relief to start once more and lose
sound of its wailing in the general rumble. As for the scenery, only as
a picture of shiver-provoking monotony and desolation would one care to
take a second look.

And yet, some miles ahead, striving hard to reach the railway in time to
intercept this very train, a small battalion of cavalry was struggling
through the blasts, officers and men afoot and dragging their own
benumbed limbs and half-benumbed chargers through the drifts that lay
deep at the bottom of every "coulée." Some few soldiers remained in
saddle: they were too frozen to walk at all. Some few fell behind, and
would have thrown themselves flat upon the prairie in the lethargy that
is but premonition of death by freezing. Like men half deadened by
morphine, their rescue depended on heroic measures, humane in their
seeming brutality. Officers who at other times were all gentleness now
fell upon the hapless stragglers with kicks and blows. As the train drew
up at the platform of a station in mid-prairie, a horseman enveloped in
fur and frost and steam from his panting steed reined up beside the