Outside through the window came the sound of an Indian war-whoop."_One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh but the earth abideth forever. The workmen filed, some of them talking, others silent, a few muttering, to the washroom to wash up. The half-completed pumps were put away in their racks. Silently for the most part, the workmen hung up their tools. He shook his head ruefully and smiled at the men, a little grimly perhaps.ĭ"Well, it's a regular chinook, boys," he said. The foreman put his finger in his mouth to moisten it and held it up in the air. A wonderful thing had happened to him there. Duluth was far across the blue waters of the lake in the hills of Minnesota. He had once made a trip as far as Duluth. The warm chinook wind came in through the window into the pump-factory. A chinook wind the pump fellows called it. Outside in the yard the snow had begun to melt. He opened the window carefully, just a crack. Soon it would be time to shut the pump-factory for the night. There was nothing rococo about it, like the buildings he had seen in Paris. He cut away from the tracks and passed the Mancelona High School. Finally he came to where he could see the lights of the switch-yard. The ties were stiff and hard under his feet. He walked along the railroad track toward town. When he came to himself everything was dark. One night, after Scripps and his old woman had been out drinking on the railroad line for three or four days, he lost his wife. Scripps had a daughter whom he playfully called Lousy O'Neil. Sometimes they drank for a week at a time. They would sit under a pine-tree on a little hill that overlooked the railway and drink. They would go down together to the railway station and walk out along the tracks, and then sit together and drink and watch the trains go by. When he was drunk he and his wife were happy. With his wife in Mancelona Scripps often got drunk. He looked out at the snow-covered pump-yards and thought what spring would mean. He had not seen the wife who lived in Mancelona since last spring. One lived in Mancelona and the other lived in Petoskey.
As he looked out of the window, standing tall and lean and resilient with his own tenuous hardness, he thought of both of them.
Two weeks that were to have been the happiest weeks of his life. Perhaps it was the little fairy tracings that reminded him of the gay city where he had once spent two weeks. Yogi Johnson looked out of the window at the snowed-in pumps, and his breath made little fairy tracings on the cold windowpane.
station, where they would be loaded on flat-cars and shipped away. Once the spring should come and the snow melt, workmen from the factory would break out the pumps from piles where they were snowed in and haul them down to the G.
Snow covered the crated pumps that would soon be shipped away. Both stood and looked out at the empty yard of the pump-factory. Near Yogi at the next window but one stood Scripps O'Neil, a tall, lean man with a tall, lean face. Could it be that what this writing fellow Hutchinson had said, "If winter comes can spring be far behind?" would be true again this year? Yogi Johnson wondered. Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the window of a big pump-factory in Michigan.
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