In this humorous story, the narrator finds out during a "driving" snowstorm in his hometown of Cleveland that his friend, John B. Hackett, has died. He is asked to accompany the coffin holding the corpse on a train to its destination in Wisconsin.

The weather makes the narrator's journey uncomfortable in two ways. The snowstorm continues to rage. It is called a "tempest" and "arctic weather."

First, the weather causes Thompson, who has started a fire in the stove, to stop up cracks and places in the train car where cold can enter. This means that the awful smell emanating from the coffin is all the more trapped in the train car where the men are sitting. Later, the men will take turns standing by a broken window to get air, but this will make them half frozen.

The second problem the snowstorm causes is to make it so cold out that the men can only exit the train for a few moments at train stops to breathe in fresh air.

However, the snowstorm and the cold are the least of their discomforts. The problem is what they think is the scent of decomposing flesh from the coffin. Actually, the coffin is holding guns, not a body, and it is the Limburger cheese (and the imaginations of the men) that creates the overpowering odor.

At the end of the story, the narrator states:

I found out, then, that I had spent that awful night with a harmless box of rifles and a lot of innocent cheese.