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.