A storm was brewing in the mountains. The white glare of the earlier day had been supplanted by a dull gray, and the peaks that shut the winter landscape in were "smoking," sure harbinger of a blizzard already raging in the high Sierras. The pines above the Crogans' cabin stood like spectral sentinels in the failing light, their drooping branches heavy with the snow of many storms. Mrs. Tom Crogan sat at the window looking listlessly into the darkening day.
In the spring she had come with her husband from the little Minnesota town that was their home, full of hope and the joy of life. The mountains were beautiful then with wild flowers and the sweet smell of fragrant firs, and as she rocked her baby to sleep in their deep shadows she sang to him the songs her mother had crooned over her cradle in her tuneful Swedish tongue. Life then had seemed very fair, and the snowshed hardly a shadow across it. For to her life there were two sides: one that looked out upon the mountains and the trees and the wild things that stirred in God's beautiful world; the other the blind side that turned toward the darkness man had made in his fight to conquer that world. Tom Crogan was a dispatcher at a signal station in the great snowsheds that stretched forty miles or more up the slopes of the Sierras, plunging the road to the Land of Sunshine into hour-long gloom just when the jagged "saw-tooth" peaks, that give the range its name, came into sight. Travelers knew them to their grief: a huge crawling thing of timber and stout planks--so it seemed as one caught fleeting glimpses of it in the brief escapes from its murky embrace--that followed the mountain up, hugging its side close as it rose farther and farther toward the summit. Hideous always, in winter buried often out of sight by the smashing avalanches Old Boreas hurled at the pigmy folk who dared challenge him in his own realm; but within the shelter of the snowsheds they laughed at his bluster, secure from harm, for then it served its appointed purpose.
The Crogans' house fronted or backed--whichever way one chose to look at it--upon the shed. Tom's office, where the telegraph ticker was always talking of men and things in the desert sands to the east, or in the orange groves over the Divide, never saw the sunshine it told of. It burrowed in perpetual gloom. Nine times a day trains full of travelers, who peered curiously at the signalmen with their lanterns and at Tom as so many human moles burrowing in the mountain, came and went, and took the world of men with them, yawning as they departed at the prospect of more miles of night. At odd intervals long freight trains lingered, awaiting orders, and lent a more human touch. For the engineer had time to swap yarns with Tom, and the brakemen looked in to chuck the baby under the chin and to predict, when their smudge faces frightened him, that he would grow up to be as fine a railroader as his father: his yell was as good as a whistle to "down brakes." Even a wandering hobo once in a while showed his face from behind the truck on which he was stealing a ride 'cross country, and grimaced at Mrs. Tom, safe in the belief that she would not give him away. And she didn't.