."

He stooped, as he spoke, and pulled the blanket from under a broken door,
and the child nestled its face in his neck, telling him in expressive,
complaining sounds the story of his terror and discomfort.

A man burrowed out of the snow above the log. His leg was injured, but he
began to creep, dragging it, in the direction of the woman's voice. "I'm
coming, Mary," he cried. "For God's sake, stop."

Tisdale picked up a strip from the broken door and hurried to his aid. He
put the child down and used the board as a shovel, and Joey, watching from
the peephole in his blanket, laughed and crowed again. Up the slope the
operator and his companion had extricated a brakeman, who, forgetting his
own injuries, joined the little force of rescuers.

At last the cries ceased. Haste was no longer imperative. The remaining
coaches were buried under tons of snow and debris. Weeks of labor, with
relays of men, might not reach them all. And it was time to let the
outside world know. The telephone lines were down, the telegraph out of
commission, and Tisdale, with the baby to bear him company, started to
carry the news to Scenic Hot Springs.

It had grown very cold when he rounded the top of the gorge. The arrested
thaw hung in myriads of small icicles on every bough; they changed to
rubies when the late sun blazed out briefly; the trees seemed strung with
gems; the winds that gathered on the high dome above the upper canyon
rushed across the summit of the ridge. They fluted every pipe, and, as
though it were an enchanted forest, all the small pendants on all the
branches changed to striking cymbals and silver bells. The baby slept as
warm and safe in his blanket as though he had not left his mother's arms.

Once there came a momentary lull, and on the silence, far off--so far it
seemed hardly more than a human breath drifting with the lighter current
that still set towards him from the loftier peak--Tisdale heard some one
calling him. His pulses missed their beat and raced on at fever heat. He
believed, in that halting instant, it was Beatriz Weatherbee. Then the
gale, making up for the pause, swept down in fury, and he hurried under
the shelter of the ridge with the child. He told himself there had been no
voice; it was an illusion. That the catastrophe, following so closely on
his illness, had unhinged him a little. The Morganstein party had
doubtless returned to Seattle at the beginning of the thaw; and even had
Mrs. Weather