The woman was Mrs. Sours, wife of my employer. One morning, after every one had left the breakfast-table except her husband and myself, she said to me: "Jud, couldn't you run the hotel this winter, now that there are only three or four boarders left, and them not important nor particular, only so they get enough to eat?" "I don't know, ma'am," I said. "I can run the barn, but I'm afraid I don't know much about a hotel." "Do you hear the boy say he can do it, Henry?" says she, turning to her husband. "Of course he can do it, and do it well, too. He always said his mother taught him how to cook. That means I'm a-going down on the train to-morrow, and not coming back to this wretched country till spring has melted off the snow and made it fit for a decent body to live in." "Well, all right," said Sours. "You may go; Jud and me are good for it." "Mercy sakes!" cried Mrs. Sours, "do you suppose I'm going to leave you here to be frozen to death, and starved to death, and killed by the wolves that we already hear howling every night, and murdered by Indians, and shot by Pike and that wretched band of horse-thieves that the Billings sheriffs who stopped here the other night was looking for? No, Henry; when I go I am going to take you with me." Sours tried to argue with her a little, but it did no sort of good, and the next day they both went off and I was left in charge of the hotel for the winter with three boarders--Tom Carr, the station agent and telegraph operator; Frank Valentine, the postmaster; and a Norwegian named Andrew, who was to take my place in the barn. Allenham had gone before the blizzard. Some others went on the same train with Mr. Sours and his wife. We were twenty-six, all told, that night. The weather remained bad, and the train was often late or did not come at all. On the last day of November there were an even fourteen of us left. On the morning of that day week Tom Carr came over from the station and brought word that he had just got a telegram from headquarters saying that for the rest of the winter the train would run to Track's End but once a week, coming up Wednesday and going back Thursday. "Well, that settles it with _me_," said Harvey Tucker. "I shall go back with it the first Thursday it goes." "Same with me," said a man named West. "I know when I've got enough, and I've got enough of Track's End." Mr. Clerkinwell, who happened to be present, laughed cheerfully. He was by far the oldest man left, but he always seemed the least discouraged. "Oh," he said to the others, "that's nothing. The train does us no good except to bring the mail, and it can bring it just as well once a week as twice. We were really pampered with that train coming to us twice a week," and he laughed again and went out.