Wes Boyd’s Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online

Chapter 22

1806 1/9/1981 – 0352 1/10/1981:
Decatur & Overland Snowplow Extra 3217

Ron Crane was sitting in the Coldwater Fire Station when the call came in about the train wreck.

It was very quiet around the station; the department had left for Spearfish Lake and Warsaw hours before, and the Rochester Department had agreed to send a tanker and a pumper to Coldwater for emergency backup. It had turned out that Rochester’s detachment wouldn’t be able to get to Coldwater until after the plows were done with convoying the Coldwater department northward and they could be handed off to a Spearfish Lake County plow.

That left the town with no fire department for a few hours, but Crane wasn’t as worried about that as he once would have been.

Once upon a time, Crane had been the Coldwater Assistant Fire Chief; a couple more years, maybe three or four, when Charlie Paschal retired, he would have been chief – but that was before the muscular dystrophy stranded him in his wheelchair. Nowadays, Crane mostly worked the fire station base radio when the department was out on a fire and did some of the paperwork, all as an effort to keep himself occupied and useful. He still held an EMT card and made occasional medical emergency runs if no one else was around and if he had first-aiders available – and he always had them, now.

About a year and a half before, Coldwater was out with every other department for fifty miles around fighting a wild forest fire in tinder-dry woods, and Crane had been left at the station, as always, when he got a call to a garage fire on the north side of town.

Crane always claimed that he had never thought out in advance what he would do in a situation like that, but it only took him the distance from the telephone to the radio microphone – not far – to figure it out. The call went out to the monitors in every volunteer fireman’s home: “Fire Belles, respond to the station for a structure fire.”

The department owned an antique pumper – old enough to be a Studebaker chassis with a Hardie pump – that was usually only kept for show, and the occasional inter-department waterball meet. The Fire Belles were the Coldwater Fire Department’s ladies auxiliary, usually holding bake sales or other fundraisers for good causes – but the Fire Belles were also the regional waterball champions. Crane, who could go a short distance on crutches, had gotten the old pumper running by the time the women responded.

Though the ladies weren’t skilled enough to do any more than “surround and drown,” and only had odds and ends of turnout gear left by the men and not grabbed in their rush to get to the woods wildfire, the old pumper could still hook to a hydrant and pump water, with Crane yelling instructions through a bull horn. They hadn’t been able to save the garage, but they had kept the fire from spreading to the attached house and to the neighbors – no small feat, as dry as everything was. The fire was out and the pumper was back at the station before a pumper arrived from Atlanta, the nearest available department with equipment still at home.

It had been a turning point for the Coldwater Fire Belles – three of the women who’d fought the fire that day now held Firefighter I certificates and were on the way to Spearfish Lake with the rest of the department. Several others were working on firefighter certificates, and most now had advanced first aid cards or were EMTs.

The Fire Belles hadn’t held a bake sale in over a year.

The old Studebaker truck sat in the station with Crane this snowy day, just in case, but now, it was not as big a thing as it once would have been to hear his words over the common fire frequency, “Fire Belles with snowmobiles, report to the station for a medical emergency.”

A few minutes later, Bruce Page heard the snowmobiles coming up the road, and stopping at the crossing. He thanked the old woman who had given him shelter, and went out to meet them. “You the ambulance people?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Crane replied from the back of his snowmobile. “You must be the guy from the railroad. You ready to go?”

With Page on the back of his snowmobile to show the way, Crane led the little convoy of rescuers up the tracks to where the Lordston Northern Alco lay stranded with the injured Diane Lee.

The going northbound for Crane and the Coldwater Fire Belles wasn’t a bit easier than it had been for Bartenslager and Hottel, farther north a couple of hours earlier. The wind was against them, and it blew snow madly across the tracks. It was well after dark by now, and the headlights on the snowmobiles didn’t show through the storm as well as might have been hoped. Only the traces of Page’s slog tracking through the snow and the faint trace of where the track had been plowed out earlier were left to guide the party in many places.

At least they had enough people – experienced snowmobilers, all – to be able to change off on point every few minutes. Once the lead snowmobile had cut a path, the ones following only had to worry about following the tail light of the one ahead. They made no great speed, but crawled steadily northward.

It took the rescue party most of an hour to get to the stranded Alco. By now, snow had drifted up along the sides, and in another few hours it would be hard to find. One by one, the Fire Belles brought their snow machines to a stop in the lee of the engine.

Bruce hadn’t thoroughly warmed up after his walk south, and the bitter wind of the northbound ride had chilled him again. Nevertheless, he was the first one off of a snowmobile, and he stiffly ran the best he could up to the cab door of the Alco. He opened the door and spoke softly, “Diane?”

“You made it back!”

He smiled. “I said I’d come back for you.”

“I was worried about you,” she said, still staring at the roof of the cab. “I thought I heard snowmobiles a while ago, and I knew it was you then, but it wasn’t. I guess I was hoping too much.”

“We’re here, now,” he told her. “I’d better get out of the way and let these people work on you.”

On crutches, and with a little help from the ladies, Crane made his way into the cramped cab of the Alco. There wasn’t a lot of room for him and his helpers to work, but within a few minutes they had come to the same conclusions that Bruce had reached earlier, about the broken ribs and leg, and about the possible damage to her back.

Half a dozen hands, working the best they could in the crowded limits of the Alco’s cab, rolled Diane slightly to the side so that a plywood backboard could be slid under her. It was easy to see that it was going to be a tough move to get her out of the cab, so they tied her firmly to the backboard, then picked it up and carried it head upright out onto the rear platform of the engine. There, it was fairly easy to put her and the backboard back into her sleeping bag. They threw even more blankets over her, then carefully picked her up and loaded her onto a well-padded sled, tying her down there.

“This is going to be a long, hard ride,” Crane told her. “But it’s the best we can do out here. We’re going to take it real easy, and we’ll stop fairly often to check on you and give you a rest.”

“Let’s get it over with,” she replied weakly. “I’m so rested I could scream.”

Crane turned to the Fire Belles and said, “She’s got to have a soft ride. We’ll tow her behind my machine. If about three of you go ahead and beat out a trail, that’ll make it a lot easier. Then, I think we should have one following, in case of trouble. Page, why don’t you ride with Mindy, there?”

Crane wasn’t joking about going slow, Page found out. As he rode along behind one of the Fire Belles, he knew that he had been able to go faster when he walked out. It was Crane who had the hard job, trying to run the machine smoothly, and not give the sled any hard bumps.

At least the going was easier southbound, for the wind was now more or less behind them. It still cut across ahead of them, making the visibility poor, but at least their faces were out of the wind, and the tracks from their earlier passage were still in place, giving them the chance to find their way without too much trouble.

Even so, they stopped every few minutes. After the first stop, when they found that Diane’s face was starting to collect snow, they covered even that, and then stopped even more often to make sure the snow stayed cleared away.

It seemed to Page that the trip must have taken most of the night. In fact, it took them not much more than an hour from when they set out from the Alco until the lights of a city snowplow and an ambulance crawled into view at a forest road crossing.

The backboard was untied from the sled. “How was the ride?” one of the Fire Belles asked as they worked at the frozen ropes.

“It was better than just laying around waiting for you,” she replied. Still tied to the backboard, Diane was lifted up and placed in the ambulance. The now thoroughly chilled Bruce got in behind her, and the snowplow began to lead the slow trip to the Coldwater hospital.

Bruce leaned over and said to her, “How are you feeling?”

“I’ll make out,” she replied, staring at the roof of the ambulance, her head straining against the cervical collar that Crane had put on her neck back at the Alco. She wanted to face him. “I was so worried that you wouldn’t make it back for me.”

“I was beginning to wonder a little, myself.”

“Bruce, when I met you, I thought you were kind of a jerk,” she said weakly. “You’re not. You saved me, and you saved the Alco, and that engine is more of my life than you might think. Maybe too much. I’ve got to thank you for saving both of us. Lean over here.”

“What?”

“Lean over here,” she said, more firmly now. “I can’t kiss you, all tied down like this, so you’ll have to kiss me.”

Ambulance attendants or not, Bruce Page did as he was told. Much to his amazement, it turned into a long, heartfelt, soulful deep kiss that lingered on and on, their tongues entwining, each tasting to the other like water after a long drought. Finally, he pulled back.

“Actually,” she whispered, “I had something a little more personal in mind, but that can wait for later.”

He was silent for a moment, thinking about it. “A long time later,” he finally said. “I think, right now, we need to be friends more than we need to be lovers.”

“You’ve got a deal,” she said.

Back in the way car, the ceaseless poker game was going strong as the car rocked from side to side. Cziller thought that it was going on, but he didn’t know for sure, since he was next to Anson in the cab of the 3217.

SX-3217 was on the move again.

With the wind coming out of the northeast, there had been a considerable amount of drifting across the tracks from Rochester to Coldwater since the train had last passed this way many hours before. Now, the rotary made short work of the relatively small drifts. It picked the snow up off the tracks and threw it brutally off into the wind, but the wind carried much of the snow back to the train, which soon had its north side plastered in snow dust.

Still, SX-3217 made better time over the tracks to the east than it had made in the morning hours, since the track had been at least partially cleared. It still seemed a slow crawl to Cziller, though much better than just sitting at Rochester. He burned with the desire to get to Warsaw; and, if the plow would keep going, even with the slower rate of advance that could be expected in the unbroken snow past Whiteport, it seemed reasonable that they ought to make the town by morning.

The last word that Cziller had was that they were needed up there more than ever. He had talked to Marks about two in the afternoon, and had learned that Ellsberg was having a lot of engine trouble, and that he was giving up the support shuttle in order to be able to evacuate the town, since the fire was more dangerous than ever. The knowledge of Ellsberg’s desperate need for SX-3217’s power only deepened Steve Cziller’s frustration at the lackluster progress made so far.

“That son of a bitch breaks down again,” he told Anson, “I’m going to make the section gang shovel the rest of the way up there.”

“That’s a lot of digging,” Anson smiled absently. “That’s not what’s got me worried, though.”

“Um?”

“That plow moves snow all right when it’s running,” the engineer went on, “But I keep wondering, how will it do on brush?”

“Yeah, between the brush and the bum track up there, that is something to think about,” the road foreman agreed thoughtfully. “How far from Whiteport do you think we are?”

“Ought to be getting there any time, now,” Anson said. “It’s kind of hard to tell in this stuff.”

The blowing snow from the storm and the rotary made visibility almost nil. If it hadn’t been for the fact that the 3217 could follow the rails without help from the engineer, they would never have gotten outside of Rochester. About all that Anson could do was vary speed in response to Pickering’s orders.

There weren’t many orders from the plow, since Pickering had stabilized the speed of the train at about ten miles per hour, and had varied the speed of the plow to match snow conditions. Cziller chafed at the slow progress, but with the poor visibility there wasn’t much that he could do about it.

SX-3217 hardly slowed as it passed through Whiteport, and a few minutes later the train was around onto northbound tracks. The snow plume that the rotary threw was now going off to the west, being carried away from the train. Anson spoke up, “You know, Steve, we really ought to stop for a minute and find out how the 3259 is running. It must have really gotten plastered back there.”

Cziller nodded and radioed back to the way car for Bartenslager and Hottel to check out the engine, while they made a brief stop. A minute or two later, Hottel called over the 3259’s radio, “Can we stretch this out for a bit longer? The air filters really got packed.”

“Guess we’d better,” the road foreman replied. “We don’t want this thing dropping out on us.” He took the opportunity to go back to the way car and warm up the coffee in his thermos.

Sure enough, the poker game was still going on. DeTar was winning again, after losing money for hours. “Better get even quickly,” Cziller told him. “If the plow keeps running, we’re going to be up on that Kremmling branch before long, and then we’re going to have to put these section gang guys you’re robbing to work.”

“I’m trying,” the conductor replied. “God knows, I’m trying.”

Cziller walked on past several old box cars that had been added at Rochester. Adding them had been Bigelow’s idea, to spread out the weight on the bad track ahead. At the end of the train, Hottel and Bartenslager were still working on the 3259. “I really don’t know how this son of a bitch kept running,” the mechanic told him.

“Is it going to keep running?”

“It should now,” Hottel said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to be on it if we hadn’t stopped.”

Once the train was once again on the move, it didn’t take long to get to where the plow had broken down the morning before. The snow here was deep and hardpacked, and Pickering called for a speed reduction almost immediately. Within a minute, he called for another one, so that the plow could keep up with the snow. SX-3217 slowed to a near crawl, as the rotary chewed at the snow and blasted it off downwind.

The progress now was very slow, which chafed Cziller even more. Still, the train was moving, and at a speed that was faster than a brisk walk. It took them nearly two hours to get to the little hamlet of Hugo, on the eastern shore of Thurow Lake, and there were still several miles to go to get to Kremmling, where the real work would begin.

There wasn’t much that Steve Cziller could do as the train crawled north, except to sit in the cab of the leading Geep, drink coffee, worry about the plow and whether it would keep running, and be unnecessarily curt to Anson. Presently, SX-3217 crawled out onto a long grade through the swamps northeast of the lake, and here Pickering was able to call for a speed increase. “Now that’s better, Cziller told the long-suffering engineer.

“Yeah,” Anson replied. “We might be able to keep this up for a while, but we get off this grade before we get to Kremmling, and we’ll have to slow down again.”

Cziller was wishing profoundly that the trouble was over. With the history the rotary had, it was rather a distant hope that it would keep running all the way to Warsaw. As the minutes crept on like hours, the plow kept roaring away with never a hint of problems, shattering the blackness of the storm-ridden night with a glare that the 3217’s headlight reflected off of the plow’s snow plume.

The plow was still running at Kremmling. “Now, all we’ve got to do is to find the goddamn switch,” Anson told the road foreman.

“I thought you knew where it was.”

“I know where it is,” Anson replied. “I just ain’t too sure where I am.” Usually D&O trains ran right past the switch up to the aggregate quarry at Big Pit; no Decatur and Overland train had even tried to find the switch for the long-disused branch in years.

In the end, they had to dig for the switch, much as Ralph McPhee had done a few hours earlier, and many miles to the west. Here, Cziller was able to roust the section gang out and send them with shovels to find the switch mechanism. Naturally, the switch stand proved to be hidden under several feet of snow, and this weathered and hardpacked snow was tough shoveling.

While the section gang worked away at the buried switch, Cziller started to get the rest of his people set up for the risky push down the branch. “Jim,” he told Bartenslager, “I want you to be riding the 3259, just in case. We’re going to take it real slow, and I want you ready to make a quick pull backwards if the track begins to settle on us. Maybe we can get out on a quick one, where waiting a while might allow the head end to settle too much.”

“I’m not looking forward to this,” Bartenslager said.

“Me either,” Cziller went on. “Don’t back down unless we tell you to. We may have to stop almost any time to cut trees or something. I really don’t know what to expect.”

“I’ve heard that the track is in pretty bad shape.”

“That’s what I heard, too. I don’t know how bad of shape they meant.” Cziller yawned; he’d been going a long time. “Guess I’ll see how the section gang is doing on the switch. Oh, Tom,” he said to the conductor, “Keep a brakeman right near the uncoupling lever behind the way car. If the 3217 tries to go over the side, he might be able to get the train busted in time to keep the 3259 from going over the side, too. He’ll have to be the judge.”

While Bartenslager departed for the 3259, Cziller walked back to the head end of the train. The section gang had reached the switch, but it wasn’t dug out enough to change yet. He found Pickering talking to Anson in the 3217’s cab. “We’ll just have to go real slow and take this thing as it comes,” Cziller told the two. “I don’t want to do anything real risky if we can help it. After all, this isn’t our track, anymore. Dean, I want you to sing out right away if anything feels funny, and Harry, I want you to be ready to dump power at the first peep from Dean.”

Cziller had barely finished speaking when the section gang came trooping back to the train from the switch. “Don’t get too involved in the poker game,” the road foreman yelled to them as they passed the cab. “This next stretch is why we brought you guys. We may need you in a hurry. One of you guys, grab a chain saw and ride up here in the engine.”

Soon, they were ready. Up in the lead Geep, Anson turned to his boss and said, “Steve, do you really want to do this?”

“Nothing better to do in a town like this, and besides, the bars will be closing soon,” the road foreman replied. “Get her moving.”

Anson eased the throttle out, and SX-3217 gingerly clicked over the switch and onto the branch, where train wheels hadn’t been in years.

The snow, of course, was fully as bad as it had been to the south, but the tracks proved more stable than Cziller had feared. The snow and ice they were buried in helped to hold them in place, and the rotary plow didn’t put the stress on them that a blade plow would have. As advertised, brush was growing all over the place, and there were places where Pickering couldn’t see through it to pick out where the tracks lay.

For the first couple miles, SX-3217 was lucky with the brush, for it hadn’t grown so much that the plow couldn’t ride over it. Where it couldn’t ride the brush and young trees down, the plow ate them up, tearing up the wood and chewing it up with screaming clunks that scared the mechanic, making him think that each revolution of the plow’s blade had to be its last.

The agony of the plow could be heard in the cab of the 3217. If Cziller had worried about the plow’s lasting before, he had all the reason in the world to worry more now, as the train passed slowly down the tracks with tree branches brushing each side of the Geep’s cab.

After the first three miles, the train moved out onto another grade through a swamp. Here the snow wasn’t as bad, and the brush was smaller, but Anson kept the speed down. “The track used to be real bad right around through here,” he told Cziller.

“That’s fine,” the road foreman replied. “Just take it easy, and we’ll take it as it comes.”

The track was fully as bad as Anson had predicted. The cab of the 3217 rolled alarmingly from side to side, and the engine pitched up and down as it pushed the rotary slowly through the night. This section had never been ballasted too well, and it hadn’t received any track maintenance efforts for a decade, or perhaps two. Cziller made the whole trip along this grade while trying to hold his breath, the radio microphone in his sweaty palm. If SX-3217 got very far off the tracks here, there’d be an engine and plow, at least, and maybe the whole train lost deep in the swamp.

Back in the way car, even the poker game came to a stop. Section men and off-duty trainmen stayed near the doors of the way cars, ready to bail out into the snowstorm if the train showed signs of trying to run down the bank. They were worried just as much as Cziller, as the way cars rolled alarmingly from side to side each time SX-3217 went over a soft spot in the track.

In the middle of the swamp, the train crept over a creaking old bridge, which amazingly stayed together. “I hope they get that bridge fixed,” Anson mumbled under his breath.

“Not likely,” the road foreman replied. “I doubt if the Camden and Spearfish Lake has enough money to rebuild it, and even if they didn’t, why would they want to run anything over it?”

“Not that bridge,” Anson said. “I meant the drawbridge down at Camden. I don’t want to have to come back this way.”

Finally, they came to the end of the long, miserable grade. “We’d never have made that in the summer,” the engineer said while the rotary was slowly chewing through a deep snow and brush filled cut at the end of the grade.

The section man in the cab agreed. “The ground must be frozen enough to hold what’s left of the ties in place.”

“What’s next?” Cziller asked.

Anson strained to remember. It had been well over ten years since he had been over the track. “Seems to me that the next couple of miles is a little better. Kind of gravelly ground in there, and fairly well drained. The track was fairly decent when I went over it the last time. At least, it was better than elsewhere. God knows what it’s like now.”

The track proved stable enough to allow them to run a little faster, that is if the snow would have allowed them to. Here, though, they found themselves running even slower through a series of cuts, and there were several times that the rotary had to tunnel through the drifts, blasting a notch out of the top of them with the snow plume, much as they had done that morning in the cuts at Rochester.

“Right about now, I’m glad we’ve got that thing,” Cziller remarked to no one in particular. “Even with all the trouble we’ve had with it.”

Anson agreed. “Can you imagine burying a blade plow in that stuff and trying to pull it out again, on this track?”

“Thanks, I’d rather not. My ulcer has been working overtime as it is.”

After a few more miles, the train moved out onto another rotted grade. It was much like the one that had gone over before. The rusted track was no better here; it may have been worse, for all that Cziller could tell, but he wasn’t about to stop and inspect it. Still, they were better than halfway up the old branch, and there had been no need for Bartenslager and the 3259 or the section gang.

This was a long grade, and the slow crawl of the train kept everyone on edge just as much as it bothered the road foreman. Here, at least, there was no creaking old trestle; instead, there were several places where the tracks dipped alarmingly. In some places, the dips had to be where there had been a washout under the ties at some point in the past, and the little gullies under the tracks were bridged only by the rails and ties, and by the snow and ice that filled them.

A couple other dips had to have been places where an old culvert had collapsed a bit. Always, there was severe rolling from side to side, and sometimes it seemed to Cziller that the engine was rolling clear off of the tracks, but always it regained its feet, and SX-3217 crawled on.

Once off of this grade, they were only five miles from Walsenberg. If they could make it to that town, the horror of the bad track would be behind them, for they would be on the Camden and Spearfish Lake line east of Warsaw. Cziller knew that the C&SL ran fairly heavy limestone trains out of Summit Pit over the line in the summer, and that there had been some money spent in fixing the line up. There should be few troubles with the tracks there.

The last miles up the branch may have been the worst of all, merely because the worst seemed to be over and victory over the old, tattered line seemed to be in hand. The run took them through some rolling country with a couple of deep cuts to tunnel through, across another swamp grade, this one no better than the others, and through a long stretch where the snow was about as deep as the plow. It took them an hour to cover the last three miles.

Cziller was standing on the left side of the cab when a pinkish glow began to be seen through the storm, blinking on and off. He said nothing, but continued to stare at it, wondering what it might be. As SX-3217 crawled toward the pink light, Cziller could suddenly make out what it was.

BAR the light at the crossing flashed. BAR. BAR. BAR.

SX-3217 had reached Walsenberg.

Even that wasn’t the end of the struggle. It had been years since anyone on the train had been up that far, and no one really remembered where the switch to the C&SL main line was. About all that Cziller could do was to ease the plow forward slowly, in hope that somebody would recognize something before they derailed the plow. Fortunately, Anson was able to recognize a line of power poles that he thought paralleled the C&SL tracks.

Cziller didn’t dare push the plow beyond that. All of the SX-3217 crew members who had been up that way at one time or another detrained to look for the switch. As luck would have it, DeTar, on the way somewhere else, tripped over the switch flag, buried inches under the snow.

From there on, it was easy. While the section men dug at the switch stand, Anson and Pickering eased the plow forward to clear the switch points. With that done, the switch might have been thrown, but the section gang discovered that for whatever reason, the switch had been padlocked. Cziller, by now, wasn’t in any mood to let something like a brass padlock stop him; a hacksaw cleared the blockage within a few minutes.

It was long after midnight when he had Anson whistle the crew back aboard. Pickering powered the plow up, and the leading Geep inched it out onto the Camden and Spearfish Lake main line that they had sought for so long.

They soon discovered that the C&SL hadn’t been running to Walsenberg and Summit Pit in the winter, any more than the D&O had been running past Rochester to Big Pit. The snow here was fully as deep as it had been north of Rochester, and any hopes that Cziller might have entertained for a quick run to Warsaw soon exploded. The run over the final section was about as slow as all of the running they had been doing since nightfall, but with each turn of the plow’s blades, they were getting closer to their destination.

At least the worries about the bad track were over with. The C&SL line east from Walsenberg wasn’t very good, but it was at least on par with the D&O line north from Coldwater. They were on strange, but familiar territory, now. The last time any of these men had been here, these tracks had been the D&O’s. Now, they belonged to a little, foreign railroad, and it was strange to be traveling here.

As Snowplow Extra 3217 crept westward, the plow was running just like it was supposed to, and victory seemed in their grasp. After the Kremmling Branch, the going was easy. The tracks finally dipped down into a wide, low valley, and again they were running on a grade through a swamp. The snow plume was now being blasted directly downwind, and the snow was hitting the earth and blowing caked snow out of the trees far to the leeward of the plow train. They came to the end of the grade, and crossed a long, low trestle over the main branch of the Spearfish River. Once they were on the other side, they faced their last obstacle: the long, deep, narrow trench of Grant’s Cut, where Bud Ellsberg and Walt Archer had tried and failed to punch their way through with the Burlington and the Milwaukee the morning before.

Now, where even the C&SL’s big plow had failed, the rotary could chew right along, blasting a path with the snow that it threw through the tunnel it dug. All of a sudden, SX-3217 lurched to a stop, despite the onward surge of the 3217’s motors.

As Anson shut down, Cziller scrambled for the microphone, “Now what the hell?” he yelled.

“Engine’s running fine,” Pickering replied from the cab of the plow, buried in the snowbank. “The blade isn’t turning, I think. How about backing out of here so we can take a look at it?”

Cziller had Anson back the train up a couple lengths to a little area of level ground just before the tracks plunged into the cut. Again, Hottel and Pickering turned to the plow, while Cziller steamed in the cab of the Geep. After a few minutes, he could take it no longer, so he climbed down and walked forward to the plow.

“You guys got it figured out yet?” he asked.

Hottel looked up from inside the plow’s engine cover. In the thin, reflected light from the 3217’s headlight, Cziller could see the frustration in the man’s face. “I think we pushed too hard,” Hottel said. “The goddamn main shaft is sheared, right up by the flange that drives the blade.”

“How long is it going to take to fix?” Cziller wanted to know, feeling no less frustration than Hottel.

“There’s no way to fix it here,” Hottel said. “Not even if we’d brought Sawyer and his welding stuff. See, when the shaft went, the snow pushed the blade back into the main bearing and screwed that up. It’s going to be a hell of a big job to fix it, a shop job for sure, and we’re going to have to come up with a new main bearing.”

“Is that all?” Cziller asked.

“That’s about it, except for the fact that it’s going to take a crane to lift the blade out so we can change all of that shit.”

“We’ve only got a couple miles to go. How about if we back up to Walsenberg and try to fix it there?”

Hottel shook his head. “Maybe,” he said finally. “Maybe, if we can find the stuff.”

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