Cold air seems to have a faculty of doing damage, even inside a glowing firebox, possibly on the principle which preserves the heat of a ray of sunlight, as it passes through an intensely cold atmosphere, so that it will penetrate thick glass, and warm a room. The leaking tubes put out the fire, or reduce its vehemence so that steam cannot be maintained at driving pressure. The stricken engine coughs herself into impotence, and the train stalls. Only in a roundhouse during weather that begets such a casualty is there hope of resurrection for the dead iron horse. It has been told how the superintendent of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company almost lived on the line, nursing business with the solicitude of a mother doing her best for difficult twins. No spacious private car tended to make him feel like a monarch of all he surveyed. The nearest approach to winter luxury was the stove in the freight conductor’s caboose. If the superintendent wanted to make the most of his operating force, he could count some of the section men twice--first as maintenance-of-way men, and secondly as way freight agents at the sidings which, as already remarked, furnished more stops than stations. One bitterly cold night in February, 1897--our first winter on the baby road--we were coming down from Dauphin to Gladstone and Portage La Prairie, when, as we approached Glenella siding--a place whose hopes were linked with the name of Lady Mann’s sister--the engine’s sighing betokened a probable halt, for which force would be no remedy. Billy Walker, our first and faithfullest engine-driver, was at the throttle, and managed to induce his leaking horse to crawl into the siding. We were thirteen and a half miles from Plumas and from the possibility of wiring to Portage la Prairie for a fresh engine. The other locomotive of the system was at Dauphin. It was thirty below zero in God’s free air, and the witching hour of midnight was written on the watch. It was unsafe to sing “We won’t go home till morning”. Near the siding was a recently-arrived settler who, we knew, had a team of horses. We roused him and he promised to drive me to Plumas. Sitting in the bottom of a wagon box, set on a home-made jumper sleigh, we drove off, over the trailless snow, with never a star overhead to give us a pointer; the driver saying he knew the way, and his passenger muffled to the forehead, solemn as the grave. The driver gave signs of being almost as dead as the engine; but as he re-asserted that he knew the way to Plumas, he was allowed to pursue unquestioned the wiggling tenor of his way across the flat and hoary plain.