"It ain't very comic, Bill," John Nixon explained, "but--I begin to see your point--there ain't nothin' about blizzards in it. Let her go, Jim." "Yes," said Ware, "let her go, Burns, old chap. Majority vote for 'The Dying Cowboy'. What do _you_ say, Mrs. Nixon?" "Oh, don't bother to ast the weemen folk, out in this country," Lovina Nixon's voice came, muffled and sarcastic, from the depths of her shawl, "we ain't got no say, even when it comes to invitin' pernicketty people out to a house that ain't been swept nor dusted for two weeks." "I took and scrubbed the whole floor, Mam, two days ago," said Jim Burns, in an injured voice. "The minute I got your letter that you was comin' home, I peeled off and went to her, with snow-water an' soap." Jim Burns did not add that he had scrubbed the farmhouse because he had expected Daisy with the party. "Snow-water, eh?" Lovina's tone was half-hopeful, "well, Jim, you got more sense than I thought you had. Did you scrub behind the stove?" "I scrubbed everywhere _but_ there, Mam," said Jim Burns, a little sheepishly. "Everywhere but where the most grease-spots is," Lovina threw up her hands and lapsed again into brooding silence, "that's a man, all over again; so it is." The last verse of "The Dying Cowboy" was snatched out of the mouths of its singers by a great gust of wind and snow, scattering over the sleigh like a wave breaking over a boat. Ware, concentrated on keeping the sleighful "in good spirits", had for the moment almost forgotten the storm; but now, rudely reminded of it by the bitter, stinging snow-grains that assailed his face and drove deep between scarf and neck, he drew tight the collar of his top-coat and looked up and about. The blizzard had not yet closed about them. But in the far and hither distance it had thickened, blotting out the sun, that must now be almost at the horizon. Above, one could catch faint passing glimpses of the sky, beneath which the hurricane was throwing a dim-white canopy of upblown snow. About and about, the prairie and the air were a uniform quivering white. For perhaps a quarter-mile radius, one could still see definitely the drifts and the half-buried willow and poplar scrub; but beyond this the storm had built a superstructure, that was in opacity like a wall, but bellied and blew like a curtain under the huge inconstant impulse of the gale. Only in one respect was the motion of this rampart steady and uniform. That was in respect to its gradual, sure, terrific closing-in about the sleigh and its human handful. Ware, watching it fascinated, thought of the cell in the famous tale of "The Pit and the Pendulum", with its contracting circular wall that precipitated the prisoner into a central abyss.