One of the peculiar things about this Christmas dinner is the fact that there were no mountain grouse, no sage hen, no antelope, deer, nor elk for the menu. The truth is the storm drove everything of the kind in another direction--the direction in which we were slowly moving--and some time later, when we emerged upon the other side of the range with our ox-power so greatly reduced that we made less than a mile of progress a day, the herds of elk stampeded a dozen times past our camps, and the "fool grouse" sat a dozen in a group upon the pine boughs in the mountains and refused to move, allowing us to kill them, if so disposed, one at a time; but we did it only once, just to prove that it could be done. (Colonel Roosevelt, please note!) It took us a couple of weeks to shovel our way out, and while the sun shone in the middle of the day hardly a flake of the snow melted. The air was at times biting cold, but invigorating, and every man, including the boss and the cook and even the night herder, fell to the work with a will that finally meant victory. In places we operated in the drifts as you see the excavators in a city cellar or subway operate, digging down to the surface and then benching as the open-ground miners or cellar excavators do, the men below tossing the blocks of snow up to the bench above and they in turn passing it to the top of the drift. Once or twice, in narrow passages, it was necessary to build several benches. In one place we began to tunnel, but the plan was given up, for our wagons, the regulation prairie schooners, would require a passage big enough for a railroad furniture car to pass through. After the high plateau was reached--the land that represented the watershed of the Platte Valley--it was clear sailing, and while food--wild game--was plentiful, and we ate lots of it, the memory of our Christmas dinner remained to remind us after all that in the midst of greatest hardships and suffering we often find something to be thankful for, something to bring us to our senses when we grumble or complain of our ill-luck or misfortunes. Had I been as appreciative when I partook of this mountain dinner as I am today for the blessings of Divine Providence, I would have been able to say, in relating this story, that we properly gave thanks to Him who is responsible for all our blessings and who chasteneth us for our wickedness; but I was not properly appreciative, neither were my rough but honest companions. Therefore, I take this opportunity to say grace more than forty years late: _Thank God for that snowbound Christmas dinner._ CHAPTER VII THE FATE OF ONE-EYED ED. From the cross-tree of a telegraph pole hung the body of a man when the 9:30 Union Pacific Overland Express stopped for a "slow" order across a bridge that a band of Comanche Indians had tried to burn. A Massachusetts woman enroute to 'Frisco stuck her head out of a car window and exclaimed, "How awfully terrible!" Yes, it was.