After a while he noticed two men working downward from the portal along the swath of the avalanche.  One, he conjectured, was the operator, but they stopped some distance above him and commenced to remove sections of the debris.  Then Hollis saw before him some brilliant spots on the snow.  They proved to be only pieces of stained glass from a shattered transom.  The side of the car with denuded window casings rested a few feet higher, and a corner of the top of the coach protruded from under the fallen skeleton of a fir.  The voices now seemed all around him.  Somewhere a man was shouting “Help!” Another groaned, cursing, and, deeper in the wreckage, rose a woman’s muffled, continuous screaming.  But, nearer than the rest, a child was crying piteously.  He reached the intact portion of the crushed roof and found the baby sitting unhurt on a clear breadth of snow.  The body of the father was pinned hopelessly beneath the tree, and the mother lay under the fragment of roof, an iron bar on her tender eyes.  It was as though Destiny, having destroyed them, whimsically threw a charmed circle around this remaining atom of the family.

“Well, Joey,” Tisdale said quietly, “I’ve come back for you.”

Instantly the child stopped crying and turned to listen; then, seeing Tisdale, he began to crow, rocking his little body and catching up handsful of snow to demonstrate his delight.  The hands and round bud of a mouth were blue.

“Cold, isn’t it, Joey?” And he took the baby in his arms.  “We can’t find your coat and mittens, but here is a nice blanket.”

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.