"It is when you're with a concern that's all but broke," answered the operator. "It's cheaper for this old wooden-axle outfit to quit than to go on fighting--" "That mean six weeks eef this storm keep up two days longer!" Ba'tiste broke in excitedly. "By to-morrow morning, ever' snowshed, he will be bank-full of snow. The track, he will be four inches in ice. Six week--this country, he can not stand it! Tell him so on the telegraph! Tell him the cattle, he will starve! Peuff! No longer do I think of our machinery! Eef it is los'--we are los'. But let eet go. Say to heem nothing of that. Say to heem that there are the cattle that will starve, that in the stores there is not enough provision. That--" "I know. I'll call Denver. But I don't know what chance there is--the road's been waiting for a chance to go into bankruptcy, anyway--since this new Carrow Point deal is about through. They haven't got any money--you know that, Ba'tiste. It's cheaper for them to shut down for six weeks than to try to keep running. That fifty thousand they lost on that snowplow just about put the crimp in 'em. It might cost a couple of hundred thousand more to keep the road open. What's the result? It's easier to quit. But I'll try 'em--" He turned to the key and hammered doggedly. Only soggy deadness answered. He tested his plugs and tried again. In vain. An hour later, he still was there, fighting for the impossible, striving to gain an answer from vacancy, struggling to instil life into a thing deadened by ice, and drifts, and wind, and broken, sagging telegraph poles. The line was gone! CHAPTER XIX Until dusk they remained in the boxlike station, hoping against hope. But the whine and snarl of the wind were the only sounds that came to them, the steady banking of the snow against the windows the only evidence of life. The telegraph line, somewhere between Tabernacle and the country which lay over the bleak, now deadly range, was a shattered thing, with poles buried in drifts, with loose strands of wire swinging in the gusts of the blizzard, with ice coated upon the insulations, and repair--until the sun should come and the snows melt--an almost impossible task. "It'd take a guy with a diving suit to find some of them wires, I guess," the operator hazarded, as he finally ceased his efforts and reached for his coat and hat and snowshoes. "There ain't no use staying here. You fellows are going to sleep in town to-night, ain't you?" There was little else to do. They fought their way to the rambling boarding house, there to join the loafing group in what passed for a lobby and to watch with them the lingering death of day in a shroud of white. Night brought no cessation of the wind, no lessening of the banks of snow which now were drifting high against the first-story windows; the door was only kept in working order through constant sallies of the bent old boarding-house keeper, with his snow shovel.