It was cheerless, indeed!--not a living thing visible anywhere, not a human habitation; nothing but a vast white desert; uplifted sheets of snow drifting hither and thither before the wind--a world of eddying flakes shutting out the firmament above.
"All day we moped about the cars, saying little, thinking much.

Another lingering dreary night--and hunger.
"Another dawning--another day of silence, sadness, wasting hunger, hopeless watching for succor that could not come.

A night of restless slumber, filled with dreams of feasting--wakings distressed with the gnawings of hunger.
"The fourth day came and went--and the fifth! Five days of dreadful imprisonment! A savage hunger looked out at every eye.

There was in it a sign of awful import--the foreshadowing of a something that was vaguely shaping itself in every heart--a something which no tongue dared yet to frame into words.
"The sixth day passed--the seventh dawned upon as gaunt and haggard and hopeless a company of men as ever stood in the shadow of death.

It must out now! That thing which had been growing up in every heart was ready to leap from every lip at last! Nature had been taxed to the utmost--she must yield.