The Courage of Marge O'Doone

If you had stood there in the edge of the bleak spruce forest with the wind moaning dismally through the twisting trees - midnight of deep December - the Transcontinental would have looked like a thing of fire; dull fire glowing with a smouldering warmth but of strange ghostliness and out of place. It was a weird shadow helpless and without motion and black as the half-Arctic night save for the band of illumination that cut it in twain from the first coach to the last with a space like an inky hyphen where the baggage car lay. Out of the North came armies of snow-laden clouds that scudded just above the earth and with these clouds came now and then a shrieking mockery of wind to taunt this stricken creation of man and the creatures it sheltered - men and women who had begun to shiver and whose tense white faces stared with increasing anxiety into the mysterious darkness of the night that hung like a sable curtain ten feet from the car windows.