Trenholme saw the black and fiery monster come on into his dark and silent white world.  It shook a great plume of flaming smoke above its snorting head, and by the light of the blazing jewel in its front he saw that the iron plough it drove before it was casting the snow in misty fountains to right and left.

When the engine stopped, Trenholme found that there was a small car with it, containing about twenty men sent to dig out the drifts where snow sheds had given way.  These were chiefly French Canadians of a rather low type.  The engine-driver was a Frenchman too; but there was a brisk English-speaking man whose business it was to set the disordered telegraph system to rights.  He came into the station-room to test its condition at this point of the route.  As there was a stove in their car, only a few of the men straggled in after him.  At a larger place the party might have been tempted to tarry, but here they had no thought of stopping an unnecessary moment.  Trenholme had no time to lose, and yet he hardly knew how to state his case.  He sought the Englishman, who was at the little telegraph table.  The engineer and some others lounged near.  He began by recalling the incident of the dead man’s disappearance.  Every one connected with the railway in those parts had heard that story.

“And look here!” said he, “as far as one can judge by description, he has come back again here to-night.”  All who could understand were listening to him now.  “See here!” he urged addressing the brisk telegraph man, “I’m afraid he will freeze to death in the snow.  He’s quite alive, you know—­alive as you are; but I want help to bring him in.”

The other was attending to his work as well as to Trenholme.  “Why can’t he come in?”

“He won’t.  I think he’s gone out of his mind.  He’ll die if he’s left.  It’s a matter of life or death, I tell you.  He’s too strong for me to manage alone.  Someone must come too.”

The brisk man looked at the engineer, and the French engineer looked at him.

“What’s he doing out there?”

“He’s just out by the wood.”

It ended in the two men finding snow-shoes and going with Trenholme across the snow.

They all three peered through the dimness at the space between them and the wood, and they saw nothing.  They retraced the snow-shoe tracks and came to the place where the irregular circuit had been made near the end of the wood.  There was no one there.  They held up a lantern and flashed it right and left, they shouted and wandered, searching into the edge of the wood.  The old man was not to be found.

“I dare say,” said the telegraph man to Trenholme, “you’d do well to get into a place where you don’t live quite so much alone.  ’T’aint good for you.”

The whole search did not take more than twenty minutes.  The railway-men went back at a quick pace.  Trenholme went with them, insisting only that they should look at the track of the stranger’s snow-shoes, and admit that it was not his own track.