Then I
relaxed my pull the slightest bit and clicked my tongue.
"Good," I thought, "they are pulling together!" And I
managed to hold them in line. They reared and plunged
again like drowning things in their last agony, but they
no longer clashed against nor pulled away from each other.
I measured the distance with my eye. Another two hundred
yards or thereabout, and I pulled them in again. Thus we
stopped altogether four times. The horses were steaming
when we got through this drift which was exactly half a
mile long; my cutter was packed level full with slabs
and clods of snow; and I was pretty well exhausted myself.
"If there is very much of this," I thought for the moment,
"I may not be able to make it." But then I knew that a
north-south road will drift in badly only under exceptional
circumstances. It is the east-west grades that are most
apt to give trouble. Not that I minded my part of it,
but I did not mean to kill my horses. I had sized them
up in their behaviour towards snow. Peter, as I had
expected, was excitable. It was hard to recognize in him
just now, as he walked quietly along, the uproar of
playing muscle and rearing limbs that he had been when
we first struck the snow.
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