But the unexpected did occur.  As Seagreave had predicted, the snow began to fall, and began the very night that Pearl danced in the town hall; and fell so steadily and uninterruptedly that the progress of the train which bore Hanson down the mountains was considerably impeded.  Thus, the very forces of the air conspired for Jose, and ably were they seconded by other invisible and unknown agencies.  Even before Hanson had reached the coast he found himself powerless “in the fell clutch of circumstance.”  He had taken cold in the mountains and for several weeks was too seriously ill even to contemplate with much interest his plan of revenge.  And by the time that he had recovered sufficiently to give consideration to the matter again, a very little investigation convinced him of the necessity for patience.  So thoroughly had the season and the elements conspired, that Colina was effectually cut off from the outer world, a camp beleaguered by snow, and Jose, for several months at least, would be the prisoner of the mountains and not of man.

But Colina was used to this experience.  It was one which she had regularly undergone every winter of her existence.  Therefore, her inhabitants prepared for it and bore it with what equanimity they could summon.  It was but a small camp so far up in the mountains that the mines were practically only worked during the late spring, the summer and the early autumn months, for the water which ran the concentrating and stamp mills was frozen early in the winter and the mines were practically closed down.  One or two, like the Mont d’Or, were kept open, and worked a few hours a day, but no milling was done and the ore dumps increased to vast size.

The railroad, a steep and tortuous way, was not, per se a passenger line, but existed to carry the ore down to the smelters, therefore, when there was no ore to carry, it was a matter of indifference to the mine owners who controlled the line whether trains ran or not; in fact, they preferred not from a strictly business standpoint, and truly they had an excellent excuse in the heavy drifts which completely obliterated the narrow, shining, steel path which led to the world beyond the mountains.

The police officials whom Hanson consulted as soon as his returning health permitted him to do so, realized that in spite of their anxiety to secure the famous and slippery Crop-eared Jose, he was quite as safely imprisoned by the mountains as if they themselves had secured him.  There was no possible escape for him.  All trails were blocked long before the railroad was, so there he was, caught as securely as a bird in a cage, and they, his potential captors, might sit down to a comfortable period of pleasant anticipation and await that thaw which was bound to come sooner or later.  So much for Gallito’s unexpected.