"Shove on all the clothes you can get on to you, Eng—Bill," counselled John Nixon, sucking his teeth shrilly as he donned a lupine-looking wombat coat and reached for his mittens, "and after that put on an extry sweater, as they say. She's a-going to blow."

The place was the Toddburn hotel, where Sir William and John Nixon, left there by the warm and friendly train at 11 a.m., had now, an hour and a half later, come out of the dining-room with a good meal "under their belts".

"You don't need to hurry, gettin' your duds on, Bill," John Nixon said, as he went out, "the Missis will be pokin' around the store down there for an hour yet, and Jim's buyin' himself a new suit, to have for when Daise gets here. I've told him she's married now, but it don't seem to sink in.... You better stay here and keep warm till we fetch the team round to the door."

Sir William stayed—not to keep warm, but to look about him, like a boy at a circus. Somehow, the effect of the cold dry tingling air that resided in the streets of this prairie hamlet seemed to percolate in from outside, in spite of storm window and door, striking upon the nostrils bracingly and making one "feel good" in spite of the blue fog of tobacco-smoke and the odor of wet leather and fur. The effects of Ware's accident, now a week old, had pretty well passed, and the hereditary health of the Wares glowed in his face again and sparkled in his eyes.

He stood with his back toward the window, his hands tucked into the side-pockets of his Norfolk coat, his attitude the Englishman's inimitable easy and negligent one which imparts to the stiffest suit the comfortable effect of flannels, and glanced down the short perspective of the Toddburn hotel sitting room and bar, which were in a kind of suite, with a swinging-door between.

The roof of this place was very low, and the walls were very near one, and after the spacious places in which Ware had lived his life, it was a bit like standing in a piano-box. If the situation of this hotel had been a narrow byway in a city, it would have been a slum, a locality of death, a room of hollow coughings and faces dreary with debility and gloom. But here, on the wide prairie it was in effect a sanitarium, if one might judge by the figures that breezed about, the harsh but deep-lunged voices that came out of the midst of steam-clouds made when the outside door opened, the faces glowing and tanned by gale and snow-shine.

One only needed to listen a moment to the hearty laughing and the sentences detached at random from the blend of cheery, companionable greeting and rallying, to know that the minds of these western men were as healthy as their bodies.

"No, sir—I'd never go back on him. Bob an' me was neighbors a-homesteadin'. It ain't his fault if he had to give up farmin' and get a job in Jim McMillan's livery stable. His health give out—that's all."

"Yes, sir, boy—she's a-goin' to blow up some harricane before dark. This reminds me of yon day, four years ago—yous'll all remember the time—when Elleck Hamilton an' me started out for home on the bob-sleighs, pickled up to the eyebrows. Elleck, he was worse than me when we started; but Elleck's as strong as a horse, and when she started to blow, he slung off the effects of the licker like tossin' off a hat. But the stuff had got a kind of a holt on me; I got cold and started for to go to sleep. However, Elleck he seen me home safe. My face was froze a little, that's all—but Elleck, he'd had to get out of his bob-sleigh so many times to look after my team, that he'd froze both legs, one as fur as the ankle and the other clare up to the knee. Had to have her taken off. Never was any good after that, Elleck. He was worth about ten thousand dollars when that happened; and to-day he's buyin' grain for an elevator company, at seventy-five dollars a month. But I've done pretty well myself, an' old Elleck knows this—that whenever his pride'll let him quit work, he can come over to my place, and set down by the stove, and put his bad leg up on a chair an' keep her there, for life, even if he lives to be a hundred and fifty."

Exclamation and anecdote rattled on; fog of tobacco-smoke and stench of snow melting on fur filled the air; free grammar and the broad "a" had unchecked currency in this organ-box of a western railway-hamlet hotel: but Sir William Ware, standing by the iron-rodded window with philosophic hands in his coat-pockets, had only one distinguishable impression—that he was being educated, that this west was giving him something denied by the university.

This was Western Canada—blunt, gruff, western Canada. Not too forward in making one's acquaintance; not too stiff and "standoffish". Not caring sixpence—so long as you yourself were "all right"—who your father was, nor how much money you were worth. Western Canada, where nobody who works—or, if he can't or won't work, can tell a good yarn—is allowed to starve. Western Canada, which never "picks" a fight, but—well, just try to "run on" her!

A raucous "hey!" brought Sir William about. Glancing out through the window, in the direction of the hall, he saw John Nixon signalling to him from the seat of a bob-sleigh. Hurrying on scarf and coat, Ware hastened out, creaked across the sidewalk and smilingly awaited instructions as to boarding this western vehicle of the long trail. It had a high, green-painted double box. The front and rear seats were two boards laid across the box and draped with gunny-sacks. The front seat was occupied by John Nixon and Jim Burns, the hired man who had brought the equipage in to meet the train. On the hind seat Lovina Nixon perched, nothing of her visible except one stoical pioneer-woman eye which looked out unwinkingly at Ware through a crack between folds of gray shawl.

"Climb in alongside the Missis, Bill," directed John Nixon, who had made no special preparation for extreme weather conditions, other than to pull his corduroy cap down over his ears, "We'll need to get a-goin', if we're intendin' to strike home before we get blew off the trail. All set?"

"All set, old chap," Sir William responded, as he tucked his end of the goatskin robe around his knees and, in response to Lovina's mumbled recommendation, felt with his toes for the extra brick which Nixon had heated for him on the top of the livery stable stove; "it's a jolly good thing Daisy decided to do as Mother wanted and stay in town for a week. Perhaps we shall have a better day, to bring her out."

"Oh, the gal wouldn't mind this," Nixon rejoined, casually, after he had "clucked" the horses into a trot down the drifted street; "no, sir, Bill; she'd have got you off that seat, a-runnin' behind in the sleigh-track, as soon as your toes would start for to feel nippy. It would take a mighty high wind to chase Daise into the house in the winter-time, except when dinner is ready. Her and the dog is about even, when it comes to standin' the cold. Ain't that so mother?"

"Oh, yes, it's so," Lovina's voice, muffled but still recognizable in its sharpness, said through the swathes of shawl, "except when I ust to want her to fetch in an armful o' wood or a pail of water. Then you couldn't budge her from behint the stove."

"Aw, go on," Nixon, happy to be on the way home to the "stock" again, swung his whip jovially but harmlessly over the backs of the horses. "Wait till you see the happy reunion between her and Rove, Bill, when she gets here next week. It'll prove what I say about them bein' chums. Rove, he would have no use for a girl that stayed in the house: you couldn't coax him any closer to in-doors than the chip-pile, not if it was sixty below zero."

The two bay sleigh-ponies—a light team had been chosen, as they could stand quick travel over difficult roads better than the heavy-fetlocked, big-haunched, working horses—trotted along sure-footed on the hard ridge of the trail. The last house on Toddburn's one short street was soon passed. Turning out at a wide angle from the railroad, at a point where Ware saw one of the country's tall red elevators, with staccato explosion of gasoline engine, pouring wheat into a freight-car, the prairie road set off alone across the white country.

The snowfall had been unseasonably heavy this autumn; and Sir William, looking over the side of the sleigh-box at a point where some passing horse had accidentally inched out into the soft snow and put down a leg, saw a hole nearly fifty inches deep. Plainly, if the bob-sleigh should slip off the packed hard ridge of the road, it meant a wholesale "spill", a floundering of horses, a chilling to the marrow of all concerned, and much delay. If it happened after dark, with the blizzard—the effect of which Ware had often watched from the study window of his city home—at its height, it would be a bit awkward.

"Was you ever out in a blizzard?" said John Nixon, suddenly: as though the thought, like that of a group of castaways in an open boat under squall-clouds, had become by sympathy communal. "No? Well, you're a-goin' to be out in one to-night, English—"

"Come, come, now, old chap," reminded Ware, "no national imputations, remember. I thought it was to be 'Bill'—wasn't it?"

"Well, Bill," conceded Nixon, "as I was about to say, you're goin' to be out to-night in the finest whoopin' he-blizzard since '97. I can smell her a-comin'—all through me."

From the sleigh—which now, with the village in the distance behind and a wholly roofless horizon-line before, was the sole, small centre of life and companionship in the midst of a snowy waste—Ware looked across the drifts toward the west, where the sun of the short, late-November afternoon was trending low. The trail ran almost due north, to where the white line of the horizon met the pale blue of that part of the sky distant from the transfiguring sun. Between these two cardinal points—north and west—the voice of winter megaphoned from northwestward that bitter weather was at hand.

The distant groves roared softly, like surf heard against the wind. Afar, the sound had the similitude of hoarse, enormous exhalation; near at hand, it was like the wash and hiss of water. The whole surface of the prairie that had been fixed and frozen, now took on an aspect of life, of ceaseless scintillation and quivering like ripples in the sun. Ware, looking along the bright faces of the drifts, saw that this phenomenon was caused by multitudinous lines of hurrying snow-grains, serpentining over those white billows in the track of the wind, building with a wondrous rapidity little ribs and ridges of snow in the lee of every bump and projection in their path.

In the early afternoon, it had been warm, even to thawing-point. But now, as the wind rose, it shuttled with a sharp cold the woof of the air. Earlier, the air had been clear and speckless as the void above quiet water, and bland in its touch upon the skin. Now, it was clouded with gathering snow-atoms, hard as sand, whose impact upon face and hands was needle-sharp and whose irritation of the eyeballs blinded the vision with rheum. Earlier, the sky had been bright-blue from horizon to zenith. Now, it was half-fogged with a kind of smoke-blue mist, that was nothing other than the first draft of a trillion-atomed host of snow-motes drawn up to their unfriendly function by the cold whirlwind that should general their attack upon the prairie's winter peace.

The blizzard is like, and yet contrary to, the thunderstorm that is the crowning phenomenon of summer. It is like, in that it is preceded by a "weather-breeding" twelve hours or so of undue heat; it is like, in the effect of its attack; it is like, in its whipping of the outcast, its lashing of the earth; it is somewhat like in its roar, although there is no thunder to diapason the storm of mid-winter. But it is contrary in color, and in duration, and in direction—or rather, lack of direction. For the color of a blizzard is not a definite black, but a blinding white; its duration is not a few moments, but long hours of terrific, unabated wind-energy; its direction is everywhere—that is to say, you can turn your back to a thunderstorm, but you cannot turn your back to a blizzard. If you face to windward, you get the volley of the "spindrift" direct; if you face leeward, you get it round a corner, just as stingingly. To the wanderer, a blizzard is a succession of intersecting whirlwinds, not a direct blast from a definite point in the compass.

Sir William Ware, in this sleigh that was inching its course—at least, so it seemed—across the long ten miles that separated Toddburn village from the Nixon farm, felt an odd sense of dependence as he watched the gathering of the storm. There was in his whole fine body and brain no fibre of fear, as far as personal danger was concerned—for, besides the heritage of his family and race, he was too much the philosopher to regard the chance of death with anything but curiosity. But he felt awed by the cold, the great white vastness, the thrilling mighty wind—not yet at anything like its crescendo, either—and the feeling that his sole link with safety, this bluff Canadian pioneer who held the destiny of that sleighful in his rough-mittened hands that held the horses' reins and his wonderful, but not infallible, pioneer's sense of direction, was plainly a bit anxious in spite of all his experience.

"Suppose we have a song, old chap," he leaned forward and shouted in Nixon's ear; "start up something you know, and we'll all join in the chorus."

But John Nixon shook a diffident head. "I got all I can do, handlin' the team, Bill," he said—in his Canadian way avoiding by the excuse the admission that he could not sing. "Try Jim, here—he's the singin' bird out on our ranch. Let's have that there about the 'Mistle-tree Bough', Jim—you ain't got nothin' on your mind just now."

Jim Burns, a man of few words and short, cleared his throat and, without preamble, started "The Mistletoe Bough":

There is something "catchy" about the words and the tune of this old song of a famous tragedy, whose human interest has carried it as far around the world as "Home, Sweet Home". Ware had heard it in his nursery when it was reasonably new. He joined in it now, with a vigor that fended off the dolor of the stormy sunset and the inching sleigh on its high lonely trail. Nixon swung his whip in time; even a diffident humming came from the shawl that wrapped the head of Mrs. Lovina Nixon.

After the refrain following the last stanza was concluded, Jim Burns, on his own initiative, started his favorite, the "Blizzard Song of Meadowlea." It is a characteristic of prairie people to sing or to talk about an especially gloomy phase of a present situation. The person who has newly contracted rheumatism, for instance, is told glowingly by a sympathetic visitor that, "Hank McCaffrey, he took it in the knee—just where you got it, Joe—an' he's a-settin' on the same chair yit, an' that's ten years ago." And if Mrs. Pelkey, on the northwest quarter of Section Twenty-three, sneezes after peppering the meat in the frying-pan, Mrs. Mair, over from the northeast quarter to borrow flour for a baking of bread, remarks, "This is a bad season for to catch a cold, Bella—right in the spring o' the year. I never saw a person yet that tot'ly threw off a cold they caught in the month of Ape-rile."

It was this prairie characteristic that possessed Jim Burns, when he struck up the "Blizzard Song of Meadowlea" in the face of a gathering blizzard. This melody is a versified account of an actual happening, in which a farmhouse in the School District of Meadowlea caught fire during a blizzard and the family lost their lives in the storm.

"I say, old son," Ware leaned and tapped the singer on the shoulder at the conclusion of a line running: 'An' here an' there, in drifts of snow, a frozen corpse they found', "that is a piquant tune, you know, and you're in splendid voice—but shall we try something we all know—something comic, for instance?"

Jim Burns paused reluctantly. "Oh, all right," he grumbled, after a moment; "how about 'The Dying Cowboy'?"

"Splendid!" assented Sir William, "is that comic?"

Jim Burns rubbed his head ponderingly.

"It ain't very comic, Bill," John Nixon explained, "but—I begin to see your point—there ain't nothin' about blizzards in it. Let her go, Jim."

"Yes," said Ware, "let her go, Burns, old chap. Majority vote for 'The Dying Cowboy'. What do you say, Mrs. Nixon?"

"Oh, don't bother to ast the weemen folk, out in this country," Lovina Nixon's voice came, muffled and sarcastic, from the depths of her shawl, "we ain't got no say, even when it comes to invitin' pernicketty people out to a house that ain't been swept nor dusted for two weeks."

"I took and scrubbed the whole floor, Mam, two days ago," said Jim Burns, in an injured voice. "The minute I got your letter that you was comin' home, I peeled off and went to her, with snow-water an' soap." Jim Burns did not add that he had scrubbed the farmhouse because he had expected Daisy with the party.

"Snow-water, eh?" Lovina's tone was half-hopeful, "well, Jim, you got more sense than I thought you had. Did you scrub behind the stove?"

"I scrubbed everywhere but there, Mam," said Jim Burns, a little sheepishly.

"Everywhere but where the most grease-spots is," Lovina threw up her hands and lapsed again into brooding silence, "that's a man, all over again; so it is."

The last verse of "The Dying Cowboy" was snatched out of the mouths of its singers by a great gust of wind and snow, scattering over the sleigh like a wave breaking over a boat. Ware, concentrated on keeping the sleighful "in good spirits", had for the moment almost forgotten the storm; but now, rudely reminded of it by the bitter, stinging snow-grains that assailed his face and drove deep between scarf and neck, he drew tight the collar of his top-coat and looked up and about.

The blizzard had not yet closed about them. But in the far and hither distance it had thickened, blotting out the sun, that must now be almost at the horizon. Above, one could catch faint passing glimpses of the sky, beneath which the hurricane was throwing a dim-white canopy of upblown snow. About and about, the prairie and the air were a uniform quivering white. For perhaps a quarter-mile radius, one could still see definitely the drifts and the half-buried willow and poplar scrub; but beyond this the storm had built a superstructure, that was in opacity like a wall, but bellied and blew like a curtain under the huge inconstant impulse of the gale. Only in one respect was the motion of this rampart steady and uniform. That was in respect to its gradual, sure, terrific closing-in about the sleigh and its human handful. Ware, watching it fascinated, thought of the cell in the famous tale of "The Pit and the Pendulum", with its contracting circular wall that precipitated the prisoner into a central abyss.

No abyss yawned beneath the feet of the laboring horses nor the runners of the creaking, inching sleigh. But that road they trod was like the narrow path over a morass: all about it the footing was soft, deep, delaying. If iron-shod hoof or steel-shod runner slipped, it meant loss of time, lowering of precious bodily heat, fatigue, failing of the heart—all preparations for that slowing-down of the restless body-molecules to the final stoppage which should mark the cold triumph of the frost:

"And here and there, in drifts of snow—"

"Ugh!" said Ware, humorously.

But there was nothing comic in that nearing wall, whose base crept over the drifts like the edge of a tide at flow.

It might have been midnight, or a little before, when the Galician girl whose function it had been to keep the fire going in the Nixon farmhouse stove, saw a face move by the window outside, on the way to the door. Mary had plenty of time to see it, for the face moved very slowly beyond the frost-edged pane; and she noted that it was not the face of John Nixon, with his corduroy cap, nor the red face under a "dogskin" cap, of Jim Burns. Nor was the knock, which presently sounded faint and erratic on the door-panel—like the chance rap of a frozen branch on a window—recognizable as that of anybody she knew.

She was a little afraid, as she listened to that rap which sounded as though the visitor were half-asleep; but Mary knew enough about the northwest not to keep a man standing outside on a night like this, no matter who he might be. Accordingly, she ran and opened the door.

"G'd ev'ng," said the blue lips of Sir William Ware, as he fumbled his way across the doorjamb. Mary, glancing at his face, saw that uncanny white patches covered his cheeks and that his nose was whitened to the bridge. His feet, on the floor, dragged and scuffled like the ends of cordwood sticks.

Mary knew: she had spent five winters in the west.

"You stay there," she said, backing Sir William out of the doorway with a vigorous palm, "till I big pail ice-water bring. I fix you."

"Ah, but—stop a bit," Ware spoke thickly; "your master—and mistress—far along the trail—need help. We—Burns and I—followed the horses here. Nixon stayed—with wife—she wouldn't leave the sleigh." He stopped and leaned heavily back against the door frame. Mary saw that his eyes were closing.

"I fix you first," she said, snatching up an enormous wooden bucket, throwing her apron over her head, and rushing out to the well. About her the huge veil-ends of the storm swirled as, racing down the track of light from the open doorway, she disappeared a moment into the roaring dark; then, presently, came into view again, running, with the newly-pumped icy water splashing over the edge of the bucket.

Ware, his initiative suspended and the world appearing to race about him in a dizzy flicker of white and glare and black, leaned upon the door. He felt his legs giving way, but could not stiffen them; and presently he fell into a sitting posture on the door-sill, with the wild night on his right hand, and on his left the homely interior of the farmhouse with its coal-oil lamp flaring frantically in the draught from the open door.

In this position, and with his eyes closed, Sir William felt a hand come up to his face and rub so vigorously that the back of his head bumped the door-panel with a jolt.

"I don't know what's happening," was Sir William's vague thought, "but let it happen, whatever it is. Let anything happen—now."

The rubbing continued, with an occasional pause by the aggressor—that might have been for more or less malicious scrutiny of his or her work—and presently Sir William became aware of a slight tingling in a face that up till now had been wholly without sensation. The tingling grew to a glow; and with the glow came a bracing mental effect that brought Ware's eyes open.

"See—I fix your face," said the voice of Mary, the Galician girl, in a self-congratulatory way, "now I take me your boots off." And, without waiting for the word of consent, she ripped open the laces and drew off Ware's boots and socks. After which Sir William, watching with a curious half-interest, beheld her scoop up liberal handfuls of snow and commence to rub the bared feet from toe to ankle, as she had rubbed the face.

In the midst of this operation, a peal of bells sounded; and around the corner of the house came Jim Burns, with a fresh team hitched to the "jumper". Burns, a tough westerner, had been barely affected by the storm, except for frozen cheeks and nose, which he had rubbed out down at the stable. His feet, clad in thick felt "duffels", had escaped freezing.

"Hey-o;" he said, unconcernedly; "gittin' thawed out all right? Mary, I got to go back for Jack and the Missis—the sleigh's stuck in a drift, about two mile back along the trail. We cut the ponies loose, an' they led us home, right up to the stable door. Jack, he was a-goin' to come along too, at first, and fetch the Missis on his back—him and me would have took turns carryin' her. But she wouldn't hear of it, so Jack he told us to go on ahead. Said the ponies would take us home, all right, and I could come back in the jumper when I got warmed up. But," Jim Burns could not help a bit of western swagger, "I'm all right—I don't need no warmin' up. Rustle me a couple more blankets, Mary. I'll finish rubbin' them feet out."

"Aa, you go on, Jeem Burns," Mary, interested in this tall, pleasant-faced man the storm had brought her, pushed Burns away; "You know you where yon blankets is. You get them yourself—see!"

"A-all right," the hired man, swinging his shoulders, stepped into the farmhouse living-room, gathered up a pair of heavy gray blankets from the rail bunk in a corner, brought the coal-oil can and refilled the lantern he was to take with him, and then lighted the lantern.

"I guess I can keep the trail all right, goin' out," he said, as he stepped outside, "the wind, she'll be behind me. Comin' home, the horses'll face it all right, they'll be that keen to get back into the stable again. Well, so-long, yous; keep a good fire on, Mary."

With this, Jim Burns tossed the blankets into the jumper, hopped in after them and, standing up in the vehicle as though it was a bob-sleigh, this conscious master of the northwest blizzard took off his dogskin cap, whirled it jovially around his head, and whooped to the horses. They broke into a trot, receding down the lee of the grove where the snow came tumbling over the tree-tops in vaporous clouds, like smoke from a huge smoke-stack; and in a trice the night had swallowed them.

"You come in now," said Mary, finally; "wait, I help you." And Sir William Ware felt an arm, strong as the coil of a pythoness, constrict his waist and lift him bodily to his now sore and burning feet. Sensitive as they were, however, Sir William, putting away gentle Mary's supporting arm, stood his full weight on those restored feet, rose on his toes, turned them from side to side, and otherwise moved them to bring back circulation and pliancy.

"The doctor, he no cut them off now, eh?" commented Mary, glancing down at the healthily-reddened members in a satisfied way. Ware turned toward her instantly; stepped over; grasped her hand; shook it warmly.

"Thanks, so much," he said, with a shining gratitude, "and I wish there was a more expressive word I might use, Mary. We are, some of us," he eyed her thoughtfully, "so used to having these things done for us as a matter of course by those who are really our fellow-beings, that we often omit the 'thank you'—taking the often vital service rendered as our due, just because the good Samaritan happens to be a maid or valet. But here in Canada we're all fellow-citizens, aren't we?"

"I get you some supper," said Mary, "and fetch you a pair of the boss's socks."