Next, the Superintendent checked over mentally the location of all his plows. For the last forty-eight hours they had worked continuously; many of them had not been under shelter in that time; they took gasoline and oil from the service truck. There were six rotaries and nine push-plows for about thirty miles of highway, and from long experience the Superintendent, even without the aid of radio, knew very nearly where each one was at a given moment. The location of the push-plows was not so important, for they moved at twenty or thirty miles an hour, and could soon get anywhere they were needed. But a working rotary moved at only a half mile an hour, and to shift it to some other spot meant that it would be out of action for a while, at a time when it was most needed.

From the wind-direction the Superintendent knew that the problem in the next few hours would be the five miles just west of the summit. One rotary was on the east face of the pass and would have to stay there; two others were similarly pinned to the lower fifteen miles of the west slope; that left him only three for the real fight and two of those were not well placed. By radio he ordered one of them to turn around and start working back on the opposite side of the road; the other one was coming the right direction already.

Closing his eyes a moment, the Superintendent figured the future positions of all the plows—at twelve, one, and two o’clock, which stretches of road would then be freshly cleared, which ones would be drifted beyond the power of the push-plows. He knew that by one o’clock three miles of the road near Fox Farm would be next to impassable. He mentally tried various rearrangements of his plows, but there was always a bottle-neck somewhere or other. And all his figurings assumed that the wind got neither worse nor better, that his operators made no bad errors, that his machines did not break down, and that no accident blocked the road and hindered the work of the plows.

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.