What shapes the legends of the Wickiup? Is it because in the winter
night the wind never sleeps in the gorge above the headquarters shack
that despatchers talk yet of a wind that froze the wolf and the sheep
and the herder to marble together? Is it because McGraw runs no more
that switchmen tell of the run he made over Sweetgrass the night he
sent a plough through eight hundred head of sheep in less than a tenth
as many seconds? Could the night that laid the horse and the hunter
side by side in the Spider Park drift have been wildest of all wild
mountain nights? Or is it because Gertrude Brock and her railroad
lover rode out its storm together that mountain men say there was never
a storm like that? What shapes the Wickiup legends?
For three days Medicine Bend did not see the sun. Veering uneasily,
springing from every quarter at once, the wind wedged the gray clouds
up the mountain sides only to roll them like avalanches down the ragged
passes. At the end of the week snow was falling.
Not until the morning of the third day when reports came in of the
unheard-of temperatures in the North and West did the weather cause
real apprehension. The division never had been in such a position to
protect its winter traffic--for a year Callahan, Blood, and Glover had
been overhauling and assembling the old and the new bucking equipment.
But the wind settled at last in the northeast, and when it stilled the
mercury sunk, and when it rose the snow fell, roofing the sheds on the
passes, levelling the lower gulches, and piling up reserves along the
cuts.
The first trouble came on the main line in the Heart Mountains, and
Morris Blood, with the roadmaster of the sixth district and Benedict
Morgan, got after it with a crew together.
Between the C bridge and Potter's Gap they spent two days with a rotary
and a flanger and three consolidated engines and went home, leaving
everything swept clean, only to learn in the morning that west of the
gap there were four feet of fresh snow clear to Rozelle. From the
northern ranges came unusual reports of the continued severity of the
storms. It was hardly a series of storms, for that winter the first
storm that crossed the line lasted three weeks.
In the interval Bucks was holding to the directors at Medicine Bend,
waiting for the weather to settle enough to send them to the coast.
The Pittsburg party waited at Glen Tarn for Mr. Brock's word to join
him. At the Bend, Gertrude made love to her father, forfending the
awful moment of disclosure that must come, and the cause of her hidden
happiness and trouble strenuously made love to her.