t Georgie and his friends a pot of money.

Sankey said all the time he didn't want the lantern, but, just the same,
he always carried that particular lantern, with his full name, Sylvester
Sankey, ground into the glass just below the green mantle. Pretty
soon--Neeta being then eighteen--it was rumored that Sinclair was
engaged to Miss Sankey--was going to marry her. And marry her he did;
though that was not until after the wreck in the Blackwood gorge, the
time of the Big Snow.

It goes yet by just that name on the West End; for never was such a
winter and such a snow known on the plains and in the mountains. One
train on the northern division was stalled six weeks that winter, and
one whole coach was chopped up for kindling-wood.

But the great and desperate effort of the company was to hold open the
main line, the artery which connected the two coasts. It was a hard
winter on trainmen. Week after week the snow kept falling and blowing.
The trick was not to clear the line; it was to keep it clear. Every day
we sent out trains with the fear we should not see them again for a
week.

Freight we didn't pretend to move; local passenger business had to be
abandoned. Coal, to keep our engines and our towns supplied, we were
obliged to carry, and after that all the brains and the muscle and the
motive-power were centred on keeping 1 and 2, our through
passenger-trains, running.

Our trainmen worked like Americans; there were no cowards on our rolls.
But after too long a strain men become exhausted, benumbed,
indifferent--reckless even. The nerves give out, and will power seems to
halt on indecision--but decision is the life of the fast train.

None of our conductors stood the hopeless fight like Sankey. Sankey was
patient, taciturn, untiring, and, in a conflict with the elements,
ferocious. All the fighting-blood of his ancestors seemed to course
again in that struggle with the winter king. I can see him yet, on
bitter days, standing alongside the track, in a heavy pea-jacket and
Napoleon boots, a sealskin cap drawn snugly over his straight, black
hair, watching, ordering, signalling, while No. 1, with its frost-bitten
sleepers behind a rotary, struggled to buck through the ten and twenty
foot cuts, which lay bankful of snow west of McCloud.

Not until April did it begin to look as if we should win out. A dozen
times the line was all but choked on us. And then, when snow-ploughs
were disabled and train crews desperate,