A blizzard was blowing wildly over the American prairies one winter day
in the earlier part of the present century.
Fresh, free and straight, it came from the realms of Jack Frost, and
cold--bitterly cold--like the bergs on the Arctic seas, to which it had
but recently said farewell.
Snow, fine as dust and sharp as needles, was caught up bodily by the
wind in great masses--here in snaky coils, there in whirling eddies,
elsewhere in rolling clouds; but these had barely time to assume
indefinite forms when they were furiously scattered and swept away as by
the besom of destruction, while earth and sky commingled in a smother of
whitey-grey.
All the demons of the Far North seemed to have taken an outside passage
on that blizzard, so tremendous was the roaring and shrieking, while the
writhing of tormented snow-drifts suggested powerfully the madness of
agony.
Two white and ghostly pillars moved slowly but steadily through all this
hurly-burly in a straight line. One of the pillars was short and broad;
the other was tall and stately. Both were very solid--agreeably so,
when contrasted with surrounding chaos. Suddenly the two pillars
stopped--though the gale did not.