Collecting himself, he saw that his car was hopelessly buried in three feet of snow. He floundered ahead out of the deep snow, and then set out, half-running, up the load toward the next rotary. As he went, he already was planning. Lucky, he thought, this other rotary was so close; it could be working on that slide in ten minutes after he got to it. In three hours the road might be open again. He had other luck too. He met a car coming down, flagged it, told the driver of the snow-slide, turned him around, and saved ten minutes walking.

Right at Windy Point was the rotary. With a curt thank-you to the driver, the Superintendent jumped out, and then he realized that the rotary was not working. The operator and the swamper were peering beneath it from behind.

“Anything wrong?” shouted the Superintendent, with a sudden feeling of depression.

“We were gunning her hard into that big drift,” said the operator in half-apology. “An axle went.”

The Superintendent stopped in his tracks, figuring hard. One rotary buried, and another temporarily out. Three hours, six hours, eight hours. He would order out the whole night shift, and bring up another rotary. Eight hours. But if he threw all his remaining power against the snow-slide, the rest of the road would become impassable. Ten hours, then. Ten, or twelve.

His depression deepened to blackness. For three or four hours he could simply hold traffic at the gates; it would be merely a block, not a closed road. But twelve hours—that would even be in the papers. This rotary had been running for four days steadily; that was the chief difficulty. In the end, machines were like men; you could drive them just so hard and so long before they went to pieces.

But in this fight there was no surrender. He got the day-foreman on the radio and gave his orders. Rout out the night shift. Send down every man you can spare from the garage, even the mechanics. Order up another rotary. Stop traffic. Get into touch with the Highway Patrol. Call headquarters in Sacramento.

The operator and the swamper were already at work under the rotary. But they would not get far until the mechanics came down from the garage, and even then the process would be slow. At Windy Point the snow blew into your eyes faster than you could blink it out.

The Superintendent hurried down the road again toward the slide. He told himself that he ought to be on the spot, mapping the attack; really it was just that he wanted to be doing something.

He could hardly see his own car. The snow had almost drifted into a mound over it. The track he had made in floundering out was obscured. He waded in, and with some difficulty got the shovel which he always carried in the back of his car.