The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape. Dark, searching and sword-like, it alternately muffled³ and harried⁴ its victim, like a bull-fighter now whirling his cloak and now planting his darts⁵. This analogy brought home to the young man the fact that he himself had no cloak, and that the overcoat in which he had faced the relatively⁶ temperate⁷ air of Boston seemed no thicker than a sheet of paper on the bleak⁸ heights of Northridge. George Faxon said to himself that the place was uncommonly⁹ well-named. It clung to an exposed ledge¹⁰ over the valley from which the train had lifted him, and the wind combed it with teeth of steel that he seemed actually to hear scraping against the wooden sides of the station. Other building there was none: the village lay far down the road, and thither—since the Weymore sleigh had not come—Faxon saw himself under the necessity of plodding¹¹ through several feet of snow.

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