text: CHAPTER XX 
  
  A BLIZZARD 
  
  A bitter wind searched the poplar bluff where George and his hired man, Grierson, were cutting fuel. Except in the river valleys, trees of any size are scarce on the prairie, but the slender trunks and leafless branches were closely massed and afforded a little shelter. Outside on the open waste, the cold was almost too severe to face, and George once or twice glanced anxiously across the snowy levels, looking for some sign of Edgar, who should have joined them with the team and sledge. It was, however, difficult to see far, because a gray dimness narrowed in the horizon. George stood, dressed in snow-flecked furs, in the center of a little clearing strewn with rows of fallen trunks from which he was hewing off the branches. The work was hard; his whole body strained with each stroke of the heavy ax, but it failed to keep him warm, and the wind was growing more bitter with the approach of night. 
  
  "I don't know what can be keeping West," he said after a while. "We haven't seen the mail-carrier either, and he's two hours late; but he must have had a heavy trail all the way from the settlement. I expect he'll cut out our place and make straight for Grant's. We'll have snow before long." 
  
  There was an empty shack not far away where, by George's consent, the mail-carrier left letters when bad weather made it desirable to shorten his round. 
  
  Grierson nodded as he glanced about. The stretch of desolate white prairie had contracted since he had last noticed it, the surrounding dimness was creeping nearer in, and the ranks of poplar trunks were losing their sharpness of form. Now that the men had ceased chopping, they could hear the eerie moaning of the wind and the sharp patter of icy snow-dust among the withered brush. 