y, when Mears said it was time to stop work
till spring. When McCloud told him he wanted track across the divide
and into the lower valley by spring, Mears threw up his hands. But
there was metal in the old man, and he was for orders all the time. He
kept up a running fire of protests and forebodings about the danger of
exposing men during the winter season, but stuck to his post. Glover
sent along the men, and although two out of every three deserted the
day after they arrived, Mears kept a force in hand, and crowded the
track up the new grade as fast as the ties and steel came in, working
day in and day out with one eye on the clouds and one on the tie-line
and hoping every day for orders to stop.

December slipped away to Christmas with the steel still going down and
the disaffected element among the railroad men at Medicine Bend
waiting for disaster. The spectacle of McCloud handling a flying
column on the Crawling Stone work in the face of the most treacherous
weather in the mountain year was one that brought out constant
criticism of him among Sinclair's sympathizers and friends, and while
McCloud laughed and pushed ahead on the work, they waited only for his
discomfiture. Christmas Day found McCloud at the front, with men
still very scarce, but Mears's gang at work and laying steel. The work
train was in charge of Stevens, the freight conductor, who had been
set back after the Smoky Creek wreck and was slowly climbing back to
position. They were working in the usual way, with the flat cars ahead
pushed by the engine, the caboose coupled to the tender being on the
extreme hind end of the train.

At two o'clock on Christmas afternoon, when there was not a cloud in
the sky, the horizon thickened in the east. Within thirty minutes the
mountains from end to end of the sky-line were lost in the sweep of a
coming wind, and at three o'clock snow struck the valley like a pall.
Mears, greatly disturbed, ordered the men off the grade and into the
caboose. McCloud had been inspecting culverts ahead, and had started
for the train when the snow drove across the valley. It blotted the
landscape from sight so fast that he was glad after an anxious five
minutes to regain the ties and find himself safely with his men.

But when McCloud came in the men were bordering on a panic. Mears,
with his two foremen, had gone ahead to hunt McCloud up, and had
passed him in the storm; it was already impossible to see, or to hear
an ordinar