Teeters protested through a paroxysm of pain:

"You can't do that, Miss Kate. It's a tedious dirty trip in the caboose."

"I can't help it. I've too much at stake to take a chance. There's a big storm coming and I've got to get these sheep through in good shape.

Don't worry about me and take care of yourself."

The engine whistled a preliminary warning as Kate dropped the tent flap and swung back on her horse. Calling to Bowers to have the train held until she returned, she galloped to the Prouty House and ran up the stairs to her room, where she thrust her few articles in the flour sack that she tied on the back of her saddle when it was necessary to remain over night in town.

The last frightened sheep had been urged up the chute and the door was closed when she threw her belongings on the platform of the caboose and informed Bowers that she was going along. He too protested, but her mind was made up.

"We're going to run into a storm, and if we're sidetracked I want to be along. It's not pleasant, but it has to be done."

It was useless to argue when Kate used that tone, so Bowers had to content himself with thinking that he would make her as comfortable as circ.u.mstances would allow.

Kate stood in the doorway with her flour sack in her hand looking at Prouty as the brakes relaxed and the wheels began to grind. It was not exactly the way in which she had pictured her first trip into the world, but, with a cynical smile, it was as near the realization as her dreams ever were.

Kate had not ridden more than a hundred miles on a train in her life, and her knowledge of cities was still gathered from books and magazines.

As she had become more self-centered and absorbed in her work, her interest in the "outside" gradually had died. She told herself indifferently that there was time enough to gratify her curiosity.

She sighed as she watched the town fade and then a snowflake, featherlike and moist, swirled under the projecting roof and melted on her cheek, to recall her to herself. She swung out over the step and looked to the east where the clouds hung sagging with their weight. Yes, it was well that she had come.

Behind the plate-gla.s.s window of the Security State Bank its president stood with his hands thrust deep in his trousers' pockets watching the long train as, with much belching of smoke, it climbed the slight grade.

There were moments when Mr. Wentz cursed the Fate that had promoted him from his washing machine, and this was one of them.

Neifkins, hunched in a leather chair in the banker's office, had an obstinate look on his sunburned face.

"I'd give about half I'm worth if that was your stock goin' out," said Wentz, as he reseated himself at his desk.

Neifkins grunted.

"I heard you the first time you said that." The stubborn look on his face increased. "When I'm ready to ship, I'll ship. I know what I'm about--ME."

Wentz did not look impressed by the boast.

Neifkins added in a surly tone:

"I don't need no petticoat to show me how to handle sheep."

Wentz answered with a shrug:

"Looks to me like you might follow a worse lead. She's contracted for all the hay in sight and shoved the price on what's left up to sixteen dollars in the stack. What you goin' to do if you have to feed?"

"I won't have to feed; I'll take my chance on that. It's goin' to be an open winter," confidently.

"It's startin' in like it," Wentz replied dryly, as he glanced through the window where the falling snowflakes all but obscured the opposite side of the street. Then, emphatically: "I tell you, Neifkins, you Old Timers take too big risks."

"I suppose," the sheepman sneered, "you'd recommend my gettin' loaded up with a few hundred tons of hay I won't need."

"I'd recommend anything that would make you safe." Wentz lowered his voice, which vibrated with earnestness as he leaned forward in his chair: "Do you know what it means if a storm catches you and you have a big loss? It means that only a miracle will keep this bank from goin' on the rocks. We're hangin' on by our eyelashes now, waiting for the payment of your first big note to give us a chance to get our breath. I have the ague every time I see a hard-boiled hat comin' down the street, thinkin' it's a bank examiner. You know as well as I do that you've borrowed to the amount of your stock, and way beyond the ten per cent limit of the capital stock which we as a national bank are allowed to loan an individual--that it's a serious offense if we're found out."

"If I don't," Neifkins replied insolently, "it ain't because you haven't told me often enough."

"But you don't seem to realize the position we're in. If you did, you'd play safe and ship. It's true enough that you might make more by holding on, but it's just as true that a big storm could wipe you out." His voice sank still lower and trembled as he confessed: "It's the honest G.o.d's truth that any two dozen of our largest depositors could close our doors to-day. I beg of you, Neifkins, to ship as soon as you can get cars."

Neifkins squared his thick shoulders in the chair.

"Look here--I don't allow no man to tell me how to run my business! When that note comes due I'll be ready to meet it, so there's no need of you gettin' cold feet as reg'lar as a cloud comes up." He arose. "This storm ain't goin' to last. May be a lot of snow will fall, but it won't lay."

Neifkins' sanguine predictions were not fulfilled, for the next day the sagging wires broke and Neifkins floundered through snow to his knees on his way down town. It lay three feet deep on the level and was still falling as though it could not stop. Every road and trail was obliterated. All the surrounding country was a white trackless waste and Prouty with its roofs groaning under their weight looked like a diamond-dusted picture on a Christmas card.

There was less resonance in Neifkins' jubilant tone when he stamped into the bank and declared that it was a record-breaker of a snow fall.

Wentz asked sullenly, as he paced the floor: "How about the sheep, if this keeps up?"

"I got herders that know what to do--that's what I pay 'em for."

"Knowing what to do won't help much, with the snow too deep for the sheep to paw, and a two-days' drive from hay, even if you could get through." There was the maximum of exasperation in the president's voice.

Neifkins replied stubbornly: "I've pulled through fifty storms like this and never had no big loss yet."

"But you've never had so much at stake. You've got us to consider--"

"Don't you fret!" Neifkins interrupted impatiently. "You've worried until you're all worked up over somethin' that hasn't happened and ain't goin' to."

With this a.s.surance, which left no comfort in its wake, Neifkins went out where the first icy blast of the predicted blizzard lifted his hat and whisked it down the street.

The wind completed what the heavy snow had failed to do. Telephone and telegraph poles lay p.r.o.ne for a quarter of a mile at a stretch. It piled in drifts the snow already fallen and brought more. The blizzard enveloped Prouty until it required something more than normal courage to venture out of doors. It was the courage of desperation which ultimately sent Neifkins out in an attempt to get hay to his sheep. There was small resemblance between the optimist who had a.s.sured Wentz so confidently that everything would be all right and the perspiring and all but exhausted Neifkins who wallowed in snow to his arm-pits in an effort to break trail for the four-horse team whose driver was displaying increasing reluctance to go on with the load of baled hay stalled some mile and a half from town.

"We might as well quit," the driver called with a kind of desperate decision in his tone as he made to lay down the reins. "I can't afford to pull the life out of my horses like I got to do to make even a third of the way to-day."

Dismayed by his threat to go back, Neifkins begged:

"Don't quit me like this. I got six thousand sheep that'll starve if we don't git this hay through."

The driver hesitated. Reluctantly he picked up the lines:

"I'll give it another go, but I'm sure it's no use. The horses have pulled every pound that's in 'em, and now this wheeler's discouraged and startin' to balk. Besides, if anybody asks you, the road is gettin' no better fast."

The latter prediction in particular was correct, and their progress during the next hour could be measured in feet. The sweat trickled down the horses' necks and legs, their thick winter coats lay slick to their sides, and their breath came labored from their heaving chests. Two and sometimes three out of the four were down at a time.

The fight was too unequal; to pit their pygmean strength longer against the drifts and the fury of the elements was useless. Even Neifkins finally was convinced of that, and was about to admit as much when, without warning, wagon, driver and horses went over a cut-bank, where the animals lay on their backs, a kicking tangled ma.s.s.

It was the end. For a second Neifkins stood staring, overwhelmed with the realization that he was worse off by a good many thousand dollars than when he had come into the country--that he was wiped out--broke--and that the thin ice upon which the Security State Bank had been skating would now let it through.

CHAPTER XXVII