The Superintendent sighed. To lose his road was to lose his honor. Already he realized that the road was half-lost, but by taking the cars through in convoys he might prevent its actual closing. At such a moment he felt like jumping into his car and dashing through the storm to exhort his men to greater efforts. But that course would have been foolish; the machines, not the men, were doing the work, and the rotaries had already been driven as hard as they could be forced. Instead, he went into the radio room.

It was a quiet warm little place where a man was not even conscious of the storm outside. The lights glowed on the instrument-panel. In a calm voice he talked with the gate-keeper at Baxter—stop all trucks with trailers, tell people they’ll have to go through in convoy probably. He gave the same orders to the gate-keeper at the Lake. He organized the convoy. With the present wind the east face of the Pass was a leeward exposure and could probably be kept two lanes wide; so the one end of the convoy could be at the summit. He placed the other end a little below Fox Farm.

He grabbed some dinner, and then it was one o’clock. Over the radio he talked to two of his rotaries. Things were pretty bad, they said. Except just behind a plow the passageway was scarcely more than one-car width, and cars meeting had a hard time to pass.

The Superintendent went down to the garage. “Get ready to start convoying,” he ordered. Then he jumped into his own car, and drove out down the road into the storm. He had to have a look at things for himself. He came to the first rotary. It was faced downhill, on the windward side of the road. To throw into the wind would mean that much of the snow blew back immediately and so the great parabola of snow was arched right over the highway. But the angle was too low, and some of the snow was not clearing the wall on the leeward side. The Superintendent jumped out and yelled orders; the operator raised the angle.

Beyond the rotary the road was drifted. Even in the narrow center lane the snow was here and there eight inches deep. The Superintendent pulled aside to let an approaching car pass him. The car stalled and stopped. “He’s stuck!” thought the Superintendent, half in panic. But the car had an Idaho license, and the driver must have been experienced in the mountains. He backed out, shoved in again as far as he could, backed out again, without even stalling his engine, and then pushed through the drift and went on. The Superintendent waved enthusiastically out the window; most drivers would have stuck right there and jammed the road. But the incident settled his mind about the need of convoying.