midnight
If you had stood there in the edge of the bleak spruce forest , with the wind moaning dismally through the twisting trees -- midnight of deep December -- the Transcontinental would have looked like a thing of fire ; dull fire , glowing with a smouldering warmth , but of strange ghostliness and out of place . It was a weird shadow , helpless and without motion , and black as the half-Arctic night save for the band of illumination that cut it in twain from the first coach to the last , with a space like an inky hyphen where the baggage car lay . Out of the North came armies of snow-laden clouds that scudded just above the earth , and with these clouds came now and then a shrieking mockery of wind to taunt this stricken creation of man and the creatures it sheltered -- men and women who had begun to shiver , and whose tense white faces stared with increasing anxiety into the mysterious darkness of the night that hung like a sable curtain ten feet from the car windows . For three hours those faces had peered out into the night .