The men got to the poor dumb animals that day to feed them; to water them was impossible. Mr. Stewart went down through the roof of the shed, the door being completely sealed up with solid banks of snow and dirt. One of the guests had a wife and two children left alone in a small cottage six miles farther on, and physical force was necessary to keep him from setting out in face of the deadly tempest. To him the nights seemed weeks, and the days interminable, as they did to the rest, but it would have been death to venture out.
That night, so disturbed had all become, they lay awake listening, waiting, hoping for a change. About midnight Lincoln noticed that the roar was no longer so steady, so relentless, and so high-keyed as before. It began to lull at times, and though it came back to the attack with all its former ferocity, still there was a perceptible weakening. Its fury was becoming spasmodic. One of the men shouted down to Mr. Stewart, “The storm is over,” and when the host called back a ringing word of cheer, Lincoln sank into deep sleep in sheer relief.
Oh, the joy with which the children melted the ice on the window-panes, and peered out on the familiar landscape, dazzling, peaceful, under the brilliant sun and wide blue sky. Lincoln looked out over the wide plain, ridged with vast drifts; on the far blue line of timber, on the near-by cottages sending up cheerful columns of smoke (as if to tell him the neighbors were alive), and his heart seemed to fill his throat. But the wind was with him still, for so long and continuous had its voice sounded in his ears, that even in the perfect calm his imagination supplied its loss with fainter, fancied roarings.
Out in the barn the horses and cattle, hungry and cold, kicked and bellowed in pain, and when the men dug them out, they ran and raced like mad creatures, to start the blood circulating in their numbed and stiffened limbs. Mr. Stewart was forced to tunnel to the barn door, cutting through the hard snow as if it were clay. The drifts were solid, and the dirt mixed with the snow was disposed on the surface in beautiful wavelets, like the sands at the bottom of a lake. The drifts would bear a horse. The guests were able to go home by noon, climbing above the fences, and rattling across the plowed ground.