These preparations had been quickly made.  It was not yet dark when he worked this sled over the rim of the spur and began to descend the long slope.  The violence of the wind was broken there, so that he was able to travel erect, drawing his load.  After a while, when the flurry of snow had passed, a crust formed on the surface, and in steeper pitches he was obliged to let the toboggan forge ahead, using himself as a drag.  With the change to colder temperature, there was no further danger of slides, and to avoid the avalanche that had turned Morganstein back, the prospector shaped his course more directly into the canyon.  Soon he was below the clouds; between their ragged edges a few stars appeared.  Beyond a buttress shone a ruddy illumination.  Some firs stood against it darkly.  It was the fire Marcia and Elizabeth were watching at the place where he had cached the surplus supplies that morning.  It served as a beacon when the crispness ceased, and for an interval he was forced to mush laboriously through soft drifts.  Then he came to a first bare spot.  It was in crossing this rough ground that Frederic showed signs of returning consciousness.  But Banks gave him no attention.  He had caught a strange sound on the wind.  Others, far off, rose while he listened.  Presently, looking back beyond the end of the ridge that divided the upper gorge, he saw twinkling lights.  They were the lanterns of the searchers at the wrecked train.

The little man did not exclaim.  He did not pray.  His was the anguish of soul which finds no expression.

CHAPTER XXVII

KISMET.  AN ACT OF GOD

Afterwards, some who compared the slope where the Oriental Limited had stood, with the terrible pitches along the lower switchback, said:  “It was Fate;” and the defense in the damage suits against the Great Northern, which were decided in favor of the company, called that catastrophe at Cascade tunnel “An Act of God.”  In either solution, the fact that counted was that no avalanche had occurred at this point before; mountain men had regarded it as absolutely safe.  At noon that day, a rumor reached the stalled train that a slide at the front had struck one of the rotaries.  Laborers, at their own peril, had excavated the crew, but the plow was out of commission, and the track was buried sixty feet under fresh tons of snow and rock and fallen timber.  The Limited could not move within forty-eight hours, perhaps three days.

Tisdale picked up his bag and went out to the observation platform.  He knew that to attempt to follow the railroad through those swaths the avalanches had left, under the burned skeletons of trees ready to topple at the first pressure of other bodies of snow, was to take one’s life needlessly in his hands; but there was another way.  The slope from the track at the portal dipped through a park of hemlock and fir, and the blaze that had swept the lower mountainside had not reached this timber; the great boughs, like fishers’ nets, supported their dripping accumulations.  Also, at this altitude, there was no undergrowth.  To make the drop directly into the canyon and follow the river down to Scenic Hot Springs meant little more to him than a bracing tramp of a few hours.