AN EPIC OF THE SNOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 138, 13 June 1931, Page 11 (Supplement)

AN EPIC OF THE SNOW.

■!' I. » ' THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY HERO.

THIRTY-THREE HOURS IN A BUZZARD.

COLORADO LAD'S THRILLING COURAGE.

Bryan Untiedt, a farm boy who fought death with such thrilling courage in a blizzard-trapped school bua recently, has been invited to visit President Hoover in Washington. ' Here is revealed for the first time In full detail the boy's bravery through long hours of horror.

(By a Special Correspondent.) LAMAR (Colorado), April 20. This is the story of twenty children in Eastern Colorado who had no philosophy of courage and death, who knew only the simple faith of prayer and the refuge of jest. Death sat among them for thirty-three hours, taking five away. But death did not.sit there in their stranded bus like the armoured archangel that warriors know. He came out of the blizzard like the sandman, a creature as beautiful as ice and dreams. The story came from a hospital here in Lamar, from the blue lips of little children, who laughed and never cried. A cold wind was whipping across the flat plains on March 20, when the children set out for school. Twenty children climbed into Carl Miller's bus, a truck with a cabin window, a door in the back, and a step for the smaller children. The pupils sat on the long side scats inside, ten of them facing the other ten. The snow was already falling. Then the wind rushed out of the north like a high, thin whistle. The snowfall increased; the wind blew it horizontally. Carl Miller, sitting at the wheel, could not Bee live feet ahead. He stopped several times, crawled out into the blast and scraped the windscreen with his jack knife. The bus had left for the schoolhouse at D o'clock, and at 9.30 the rear wheels skidded into a ditch at the side of a road. What road? Nobody knew. It did not look familiar, all sheeted with white snow. Miller tried several times to drive the back wheels out of the ditch. They simply were ground more deeply in the freezing ground. His tyres were smoking. He left the wheel and sat with the children, holding his own child on his lap. The children joked and shoved, and kept warm out of good spirits. "Here Goes My Geography." Noon came. The children complained of the cold. Then a little girl, aged 10, told them to sir.mp their feet on the floor. "Come on," said Bryan Untiedt, a 13-year-old boy. "Get moving now." And the little boys moved. It must have been about three o'clock in the afternoon —they had been out in the blizzard about six hours then—when one of the younger children began to cry. "I'm so cold," he 6aid. "I wish daddy would come." Some of the other younger ones began to whimper. "Pm hungry," another said, "I want something to eat." Well, eat. The lunches were under the long seat tops. Get up, you lazy ones, and get your lunches. It wasn't so easy. The tops were frozen down. Miller kicked and pried and jerked. The seat covers would not come up. There they were, all hungry, with the lunches under metal seats six inches away. And they went hungry. There was a loose wooden scat on the driver's chair Miller split that up and dipped it in the gasoline tank, then built a good fire in the bucket from under the back of the car. The children gathered round it, rubbed their hands and wiped the smoke tears away. But it warmed them and they began to joke. Presently the wood was burned almost away. "Here goes my geography," said one girl. "Here goes my arithmetic," said Bryan. The bucket blazed up with school books. The joking continued. "The courthouse ought to be near here," Bryan said, scratching a peephole on a frosted pane. Presently the lire was gone. There was a little smoke in the bus; the heat had gone. The last school book had been burned. Night pressed at the window. The wind howled and moaned. Miller looked out of the. back door. Darkness and swirling snow. He was alarmed. Bryan knew that. Bryan with the calm blue eyes and his hands in his pockets. The Ice King's Grip. And then a window fell out with a ringing smash. The children jumped In alarm. The wind poured in, poured in with snow. The older children were concerned. The wind was screeching and all the little children were crying and wanting to go to bed. Why didn't daddy come? Up spoke Bryan with his manly drawl and boyish voice: "Now see here, you kids, my daddy will be out looking for us. Every time there is a storm he goes out on his horse to help somebody. Now be quiet and wait. It can't be long." "Children," said Miller m a stern voice, "You must not lie down on those benches. You must not go to sleep. You must keep moving. Bryan, you help me. Keep them going." _ The huddle was formed again, the little ones were made to t.tamp their feet and swing their arms, but some of them fell down and cried, and said they must go to sleep. # And the storm roared outside m tiie dark. The snow was getting deep in the front of the bus under the broken window. By midnight the children were stumbling and sobbing so that Miller could bear it no longer. "I'll let you little ones take turn about sleeping," he said. "You can only sleep a few minutes." . While they slept Miller chafed their arms and legs. Bryan was brigading the other children and keeping them shuffling in their huddle. At daybreak there was ice on their eyelashes. It rimmed the nostrils of their noses. Feet and hands were numb and stiff. A few moved in that endless ehuffle in the bus. One little boy curled up like a dog m the high-piled drift, under the broken window. At 8 o'clock Miller, frightened, said: "I am going out, children; I'll nnd somebody. Keep moving." He called Brvan to his side, the sleepless, drawling'Bryan with glassy blue eves and his hands in his pockets. > ""Listen,-boy,".he said, "I leave it tc you. Keep them moving; don't let them sleep. God bless all of you." . He opened the back door and jumped down into the blinding snow, Thej never saw him again.

Bryan had the torch. He was Miller now. He was the master. He had to keep the children moving. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. And some of the little one 3 whimpered. Two children, lay in the snow. A few staggered around. One by one they sank to the floor. Bryan stood there, his eyes wild, urging them to go on. Clara Smith, for one, did not need any urging, and suddenly he said to her, "Let's go for help. We must go." , She went with him out into the bliz- • zard. Their hands and feet were numb, j Hand in hand they crept through the snow, trying to look through the moving screen of the blizzard. "We will follow the ditch," said Bryan. 'We can't get lost that way." After thirty minutes they decided to go back. The whole world was white. The air was white, the flying snow cut their faces. , "He gave me his overcoat to wrap up my hands when we got back," Clara Smith said. "My hands were frozen." What about this incessant shuffle? Was it worth it?' "Come on, kids, keep moving," Bryan mumbled. "Come on, keep moving. . ."

A Frigid Tomb. That is the last he knew. That is about the last anybody knew. Some may have moved after that. The bus with a broken window was a frigid tomb now. Bryan's father and a friend opened the bus door soon after dark that night. The blizzard had blown away, the sky was clearing. Bryan and Clara Smith were sitting in the enow. The others were drowsing off. In the cold air was the smell of stale smoke. Frantically the two men went to work, pouring Avhisky between frozen lips, chafing wrists. And then, one by one, they dragged or supported the children to a waiting wagon. They were dumb with amazement. How could this have happened here on this much-travelled road? The snow was not too deep for traffic. To the right was a farmhouse, to the left another. Their lights were twinkling now in the gloom. They couldn't believe it. Nobody could believe it. And back in the schoolhouse two miles away was a stove and plenty of coal. But in that blizzard the bus might as well have been Btranded in Antarctica behind the great ice 'barrier. The children did not know the road; they were not sure they were on one. And so five, of them died almost in their own farmyards. The wagon creaked back to a farm nearby. Thence the surviving children were brought here to Lamar by aeroplane or motor car the next morning.— (N.A.N. A.)