"Don't you fret!" Neifkins interrupted impatiently. "You've worried until you're all worked up over somethin' that hasn't happened and ain't goin' to." With this assurance, which left no comfort in its wake, Neifkins went out where the first icy blast of the predicted blizzard lifted his hat and whisked it down the street. The wind completed what the heavy snow had failed to do. Telephone and telegraph poles lay prone for a quarter of a mile at a stretch. It piled in drifts the snow already fallen and brought more. The blizzard enveloped Prouty until it required something more than normal courage to venture out of doors. It was the courage of desperation which ultimately sent Neifkins out in an attempt to get hay to his sheep. There was small resemblance between the optimist who had assured Wentz so confidently that everything would be all right and the perspiring and all but exhausted Neifkins who wallowed in snow to his arm-pits in an effort to break trail for the four-horse team whose driver was displaying increasing reluctance to go on with the load of baled hay stalled some mile and a half from town. "We might as well quit," the driver called with a kind of desperate decision in his tone as he made to lay down the reins. "I can't afford to pull the life out of my horses like I got to do to make even a third of the way to-day." Dismayed by his threat to go back, Neifkins begged: "Don't quit me like this. I got six thousand sheep that'll starve if we don't git this hay through." The driver hesitated. Reluctantly he picked up the lines: "I'll give it another go, but I'm sure it's no use. The horses have pulled every pound that's in 'em, and now this wheeler's discouraged and startin' to balk. Besides, if anybody asks you, the road is gettin' no better fast." The latter prediction in particular was correct, and their progress during the next hour could be measured in feet. The sweat trickled down the horses' necks and legs, their thick winter coats lay slick to their sides, and their breath came labored from their heaving chests. Two and sometimes three out of the four were down at a time. The fight was too unequal; to pit their pygmean strength longer against the drifts and the fury of the elements was useless. Even Neifkins finally was convinced of that, and was about to admit as much when, without warning, wagon, driver and horses went over a cut-bank, where the animals lay on their backs, a kicking tangled mass. It was the end. For a second Neifkins stood staring, overwhelmed with the realization that he was worse off by a good many thousand dollars than when he had come into the country--that he was wiped out--broke--and that the thin ice upon which the Security State Bank had been skating would now let it through. CHAPTER XXVII THE SHEEP QUEEN