t
and greeted me. I let him water the horses and waited, watch in hand.
They got some hay, and five minutes after I had stopped, I poured their
oats into the feeding boxes.

Then to the drug store--it was locked. I hunted the druggist all over
town for nearly twenty minutes. Everybody had seen him a short while
ago; everybody knew exactly where he had been a minute before; but
nobody could discover him just then. I worked myself into a veritable
frenzy of hurry. The moisture began to break out all over my body.
I rushed back to the livery stable to tell the hostler to hitch up
again--and there stood the druggist, looking my horses over! I shall not
repeat what I said.

Five minutes later I had what I wanted, and after a few minutes more I
walked my horses out of town. It had taken me an hour and fifty minutes
to make the town, and thirty-five minutes to leave it behind.

One piece of good news I received before leaving. While I was getting
into my robes and the hostler hooked up, he told me that no fewer than
twenty-two teams had that very morning come in with cordwood from the
northern correction line. They had made a farm halfways to town by
nightfall of the day before; the rest they had gone that very day. So
there would be an unmistakable trail all the way, and there was no need
to worry over the snow.

I walked the horses for a while; then, when we were swinging round the
turn to the north, on that long, twenty-mile grade, I speeded them up.
The trail was good: that just about summarizes what I remember of the
road. All details were submerged in one now, and that one was speed. The
horses, which were in prime condition, gave me their best. Sometimes we
went over long stretches that were sandy under that inch or so of new
snow--with sand blown over the older drifts from the fields--stretches
where under ordinary circumstances I should have walked my horses--at
a gallop. Once or twice we crossed bad drifts with deep holes in them,
made by horses that were being wintered outside and that had broken in
before the snow had hardened down sufficiently to carry them. There, of
course, I had to go slowly. But as soon as the trail was smooth again,
the horses would fall back into their stride without being urged.
They had, as I said, caught the infection. My yearning for speed was
satisfied at last.

Four sights stand out.

The first is of just such bunches of horses that were being brought
through the winter with pr