Between him and the broken wire lay a fifty-yard space of treacherous-looking hummocks. It must be full of gullies and big boulders, and the snow was not yet quite deep enough to have drifted in and leveled the surface. As a shrewd storm-fighter he took his time, for in the storm and the soft snow broken skis and a sprained ankle could mean serious trouble for a man working alone, even though he was close to the highway.

The wires were heavy with clinging snow, and every pole had four or five inches caked on its windward side. Rick maneuvered so that he came first to one of the ends of the fallen wire. Several feet of it were buried, but he pulled it up and knocked the snow off. He saw that it had broken close to the insulator. The end was tapered neatly to half its diameter as the heavy copper wire under the pull of its snow-load had first stretched out like warm taffy, and then snapped.

Rick snipped off the damaged end; the fresh red of the cut contrasted sharply with the dark weathering of the outside surface. He took a little hollow sleeve of copper from his pocket, fitted one end of it over the wire, and squeezed it with his pliers to make it hold temporarily. From the coil of shiny, new wire on his back he cut off six feet, inserted one end into the sleeve, and squeezed it also. He unhooked from his belt his sleeve-rolling tool. Fastening this over the copper sleeve, he turned its crank, and by this mechanical aid squeezed the sleeve and the wires into a permanent joint stronger than the wires themselves. Then, moving over the soft snow on his skis, he found the other end of the broken wire. It easily reached the new copper wire by which he had extended the other broken end; he twisted the two together loosely and laid them at the foot of the pole.

He stopped for a moment, slapped his hands to warm them, and shook the snow from his stocking-cap and wind-breaker coat. The thick-falling flakes shut him in like fog; he could not see the line of the road, though he heard the rumble of a passing truck. He made his preparations to climb the pole. Every move was meticulous; a man working by himself in the storm does not dare make mistakes. He stuck the ski-poles upright in the snow within reach of the base of the pole. Close to the windward side of the pole he took off one ski and strapped on his climbing-iron. He detached the other ski, but still standing on it he put on the other iron. He faced the pole, picked up the loosely joined wire, laid it across his arms, and clasped his hands around the pole on the bare, lee side.