"If I don't," Neifkins replied insolently, "it ain't because you haven't told me often enough."
"But you don't seem to realize the position we're in. If you did, you'd play safe and ship. It's true enough that you might make more by holding on, but it's just as true that a big storm could wipe you out." His voice sank still lower and trembled as he confessed: "It's the honest God's truth that any two dozen of our largest depositors could close our doors to-day. I beg of you, Neifkins, to ship as soon as you can get cars."
Neifkins squared his thick shoulders in the chair.
"Look here--I don't allow no man to tell me how to run my business! When that note comes due I'll be ready to meet it, so there's no need of you gettin' cold feet as reg'lar as a cloud comes up." He arose. "This storm ain't goin' to last. May be a lot of snow will fall, but it won't lay."
Neifkins' sanguine predictions were not fulfilled, for the next day the sagging wires broke and Neifkins floundered through snow to his knees on his way down town. It lay three feet deep on the level and was still falling as though it could not stop. Every road and trail was obliterated. All the surrounding country was a white trackless waste and Prouty with its roofs groaning under their weight looked like a diamond-dusted picture on a Christmas card.
There was less resonance in Neifkins' jubilant tone when he stamped into the bank and declared that it was a record-breaker of a snow fall.
Wentz asked sullenly, as he paced the floor: "How about the sheep, if this keeps up?"
"I got herders that know what to do--that's what I pay 'em for."
"Knowing what to do won't help much, with the snow too deep for the sheep to paw, and a two-days' drive from hay, even if you could get through." There was the maximum of exasperation in the president's voice.
Neifkins replied stubbornly: "I've pulled through fifty storms like this and never had no big loss yet."
"But you've never had so much at stake. You've got us to consider--"
"Don't you fret!" Neifkins interrupted impatiently. "You've worried until you're all worked up over somethin' that hasn't happened and ain't goin' to."
With this assurance, which left no comfort in its wake, Neifkins went out where the first icy blast of the predicted blizzard lifted his hat and whisked it down the street.
The wind completed what the heavy snow had failed to do. Telephone and telegraph poles lay prone for a quarter of a mile at a stretch. It piled in drifts the snow already fallen and brought more. The blizzard enveloped Prouty until it required something more than normal courage to venture out of doors. It was the courage of desperation which ultimately sent Neifkins out in an attempt to get hay to his sheep. There was small resemblance between the optimist who had assured Wentz so confidently that everything would be all right and the perspiring and all but exhausted Neifkins who wallowed in snow to his arm-pits in an effort to break trail for the four-horse team whose driver was displaying increasing reluctance to go on with the load of baled hay stalled some mile and a half from town.