The Superintendent ate with them. He was tired too, and ready to drop into bed at the first chance. He had driven back and forth along the road that day more times than he could remember; he had jumped from the car, waded through snow, shouted orders. But most of all what wore him was the sense of a pressing-down responsibility; even as he ate, he could feel the traffic going through his own mind. Cars, trucks, and buses—hundreds of them—converged from dozens of valley roads toward the snow-clogged bottleneck which was the Pass. Just as the roads converged so did the responsibility; first upon his plows and his men, then upon the foremen, then upon the Superintendent himself. As long as he could hold the road, throwing the snow off as fast as it fell, then he was master of the situation. But if ever the road was blocked and the traffic snarled up and the work of the plows impeded, then the drifts would build up, he might lose the road, and the process of getting it opened again might take hours or even days.

A mark of the difference between the Superintendent and his men was that the men had thrown off their heavy working-outfits and had settled in for the night; their wet clothes already steamed in the drying-room. But the Superintendent still wore his boots; while the storm lasted, he was never really off-shift.

When he finished eating, he went wearily down through the covered passageway into the garage, wondering what would happen next. The garage was warm, and water was dripping from a snow-covered rotary which had pulled in for minor adjustments. But at the wide doorway, the wind whistled, and the Superintendent buttoned up his short coat as he stood looking out.

Darkness had fallen and the storm was thick. It looked like a bad night. A heavily pounding truck came up-grade from the west; a car with yellow lights followed it at an interval—then another car, and after some minutes another. Smoking his cigarette, the Superintendent was vaguely conscious of something not just right, but he could not yet analyze his feeling. Another car came up the grade from the west, then another—and the Superintendent’s vague feeling crystallized in thought. No cars had come from the east!

He looked at his cigarette. It was down to the butt, and he threw it from him into the storm. Moreover, he had been standing there a little while before lighting the cigarette. In that time no car had passed from the east. But in the same time a half dozen had passed from the west and here came two more. It might be a coincidence, and also it might be a traffic-block on the eastern slope of the Pass. He called to the garage-foreman where he was going, jumped into his car, and drove out from the calm of the garage into the blinding confusion of the storm.