A repetition of the foul-smelling wooden tunnels, the sulphur fumes, the gasping of stricken men. The same long, horrible hours, the same staggering release from labor and the welcome hardness of a sleeping spot on a wooden floor. Night after night it was the same--starlight and snow, fair weather and storm. Barry Houston had become a rough-bearded, tattered piece of human machinery like all the rest. Then, at last-- The sun! Shining faintly through the windows of the bunk car, it caused him to stir in his sleep. Dropping in a flood of ruby red, it still reflected faint streaks of color across the sky, when at last he started forth to what men had mentioned but seldom, and then with fear. For to-night was the last night, the last either in the struggle or in the lives of those who had fought their way upward to the final barricade which yet separated them from the top of the world,--the Death Trail. Smooth and sleek it showed before Houston in the early moonlight, an icy Niagara, the snow piled high above the railroad tracks, extending upward against an almost sheer wall of granite, in stacks and drifts, banked in places to a depth of a hundred feet. Already the plows were assembled,--four heavy steel monsters, with tremendous beams lashed in place and jutting upward, that they might break the overcasts and knock down the snow roofings that otherwise might form tunnels, breaking the way above as the tremendous fan of the plow would break it below. This was to be the fight of fights, there in the moonlight. Houston could see the engines breathing lazily behind their plows, sixteen great, steel contrivances, their burdens graduated in size from the tremendous auger at the fore to the lesser, almost diminutive one, by comparison, at the rear, designed to take the last of the offal from the track. For there would be no ice here; the drippings of the snowsheds, with their accompanying stalactites and stalagmites, were absent. A quick shoot and a lucky one. Otherwise,--the men who went forward to their engines would not speak of it. But there was one who did. She was standing beside the cook car as Houston passed, and she looked toward him with a glance that caused Barry to stop and to wait, as though she had called to him. Hesitatingly she came forward, and Houston's dulled mentality at last took cognizance that a hand was extended slightly. "You're still working on the engine?" "Yes." "Then you'll be with them?" "On the Death Trail? I expect to." "They talk of it as something terrible. Why?" Houston pointed to the forbidding wall of snow. His thick, broken lips mumbled in the longest speech he had known in days.