"The eternal night-it surely seemed eternal to us-wore its lagging hours
away at last, and the cold gray dawn broke in the east. As the light
grew stronger the passengers began to stir and give signs of life, one
after another, and each in turn pushed his slouched hat up from his
forehead, stretched his stiffened limbs, and glanced out of the windows
upon the cheerless prospect. It was cheer less, indeed!-not a living
thing visible anywhere, not a human habitation; nothing but a vast white
desert; uplifted sheets of snow drifting hither and thither before the
wind--a world of eddying flakes shutting out the firmament above.
"All day we moped about the cars, saying little, thinking much. Another
lingering dreary night--and hunger.
"Another dawning--another day of silence, sadness, wasting hunger,
hopeless watching for succor that could not come. A night of restless
slumber, filled with dreams of feasting--wakings distressed with the
gnawings of hunger.
"The fourth day came and went--and the fifth! Five days of dreadful
imprisonment! A savage hunger looked out at every eye. There was in it
a sign of awful import--the foreshadowing of a something that was vaguely
shaping itself in every heart--a something which no tongue dared yet to
frame into words.
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