The sun was still shining, and the snow had stopped some hours before; but the wind which had brought the storm was still blowing, and evidently it had blown a blizzard after the train stopped at four that morning. The canyon through the snowdrifts, bored by the giant rotary plow the night before, was almost filled; drifts of snow eight or ten feet high and, in places, pointing still higher, came up to the rear of the train; the end of the platform itself was buried under three feet of snow; the men standing on the platform could barely look over the higher drifts. "There's no way from the train in that direction now," Harriet Dorne lamented as she saw this. "There was no way five minutes after we stopped," one of the men standing at the end of the car volunteered. "From Fracroft on--I was the only passenger in sleeper Number Two, and they'd told me to get up; they gave me a berth in another car and cut my sleeper out at Fracroft--we were bucking the drifts about four miles an hour; it seemed to fill in behind about as fast and as thick as we were cutting it out in front. It all drifted in behind as soon as we stopped, the conductor tells me." The girl made polite acknowledgment and referred to her two companions. "What shall we do with ourselves, then?" "Cribbage, Harriet? You and I?" Avery invited. She shook her head. "If we have to play cards, get a fourth and make it auction; but must it be cards? Isn't there some way we can get out for a walk?" CHAPTER VI THE HAND IN THE AISLE The man whose interest in the passenger in Section Three of the last sleeper was most definite and understandable and, therefore, most openly acute, was Conductor Connery. Connery had passed through the Pullmans several times during the morning--first in the murk of the dawn before the dimmed lamps in the cars had been extinguished; again later, when the passengers had been getting up; and a third time after all the passengers had left their berths except Dorne, and after nearly all the berths had been unmade and the bedding packed away behind the panels overhead. Each time he passed, Connery had seen the hand which hung out into the aisle from between the curtains; but the only definite thought that came to him was that Dorne was a sound sleeper.