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.
Snowshoes were a necessity, and the demand at the little station had long exceeded the supply, but the operator was able to furnish the length of bale rope Tisdale asked of him. From the office door, where he had curiously followed to see the line put to use, he watched the traveler secure two pliable branches of hemlock, of the same size, which he brought to the station platform, and, having stripped them of needles, bent into ovals. Then, laying aside one, he commenced to weave half of the rope net-wise, filling the space in the frame he held. A sudden intelligence leaped in the agent's face. "That's simple enough," he exclaimed. "And they'll carry you as far as you want to go."
Tisdale smiled, nodding, and picked up the remaining frame.
"Strange I never saw any one try the scheme before," the operator commented. "I've weathered a good many blockades up here; seen lots of fellows, men whose time was money, bucking it out to open track. But I bet the first time this idea struck you you were up against it. I bet it's a yarn worth listening to."
Tisdale glanced up; the genial lines deepened. "It was a situation to clear a man's head. There was snow from three to seven feet deep ahead of me and going soft. My snowshoes, lost with the outfit at a hole in a Yukon crossing, were swinging down-stream under the ice. I had two sea biscuit in my pocket and a few inches of dried venison, with the nearest road-house over fifty miles away."
"Well, that was hard luck," the agent shook his head gravely.
"It was the best kind of luck," responded Tisdale quickly, "to find myself with that rope in my hands and a nice little spruce on the bank to supply frames enough for a regiment. I was rigging a kind of derrick to ease my sled up the sharp pitch from the crossing."
"I see," said the operator thoughtfully, "and the sled broke through. Lost it and the outfit. But your dogs—saved them, didn't you?"
"All but two." Tisdale's brows contracted. "They were dragged under the ice before I could cut the traces. There was leather enough on the leaders to bind those shoes on, but"—and the humorous lines deepened again—"a couple of straps, from an old suitcase, if you happen to have one, would be an improvement."
The operator hurried into the office and, after a vigorous search among the miscellaneous articles stored under his desk, found an old valise, from which he detached the desired straps. Tisdale adjusted the improvised shoes. "I will send them back by a brakeman from Scenic Springs," he said, rising from his seat on the edge of the platform. "You can keep them for a pattern."
"All right," the operator laughed. "If you do, I'll have to lay in a stock of bale rope."
It was beginning to snow again, big, soft flakes, and the wind, skimming the drifts, speedily filled the broad, light rings Tisdale left in his wake. A passenger with a baby in his arms stood on the observation platform, and the child held out its mittened hands to him, crowing, with little springs. They had formed an acquaintance during the delay in the Rockies, which had grown to intimacy in the Cascades, and Hollis slipped the carrying strap of his bag over his shoulder and stopped to toss him a snowball, before he turned from the track. "Good-by, Joey," he said. "I am coming back for you if there's a chance."
The operator, shivering, closed the door. "Never saw such a man," he commented. "But if he's lived in Alaska, a Cascade blizzard would just be a light breeze to him." He paused to put a huge stick of wood in the stove, then, after the habit of solitary humanity, resumed his soliloquy. "I bet he's seen life. I bet, whoever he is, he's somewheres near the top of the ladder. I bet, in a bunch of men, he does the thinking. And I bet what he wants, I don't care what's piled in his way, he gets."
As he descended, the trees closed behind Tisdale, rank on rank, and were enveloped in the swaying curtain of the snow. Always a certain number surrounded him; they seemed to march with him like a bodyguard. But he was oblivious of the peril that from the higher peak had appeared so imminent to Lucky Banks. When the snow-cloud lifted, the Pass was still completely veiled from him, and the peak the prospector's party had ascended was then cut off by the intervening ridge. He had crossed the headwaters and was working along this slope down the watercourse, when the noise of the first avalanche startled the gorge. A little later a far shout came to his quick ear. He answered, but when another call reached him from a different point, high up beyond the ridge, he was silent. He knew a company, separated in the neighborhood of the slide, was trying to get into communication. Then, in the interval that he waited, listening, began the ominous roar of the mightier cataclysm. The mountain he had descended seemed to heave; its front gave way; the ridge on which he stood trembled at the concussion.
Instantly, before the clamor ceased and the first cries reached him, Tisdale knew what had occurred. His sense of location told him. Then the fact was pressed on him that some on the unfortunate train still survived. He saw that the course he had taken from the west portal was no longer possible, but by keeping the curve of the ridge which joined the mountain slope and formed the top of the gorge, and by working upward, he should be able to gain the upper edge of the slide where rose the human sounds. He took this way. His shoulder, turned a little, met the lower boughs with the dip and push of the practiced woodsman, and even on the up-grade the distance fell behind him swiftly. Always subconsciously, as he moved, he saw that baby crowing him a good-by, and the young father smiling Godspeed from the observation platform; sometimes the girl mother with tender brown eyes watched him from the background. Suppose their coach, which had directly preceded the observation car, had escaped; the snow-cloud, parting on the mountain top, showed that the roofs of the station still remained.
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 débris. 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.
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. Weatherbee remained at Scenic Springs, it was not probable she had strayed far from the comfort and safety of the hotel. And recalling that night she had passed in the Wenatchee mountains, he smiled.
As twilight fell, a ruddy illumination outlined the ridge. He conjectured that the men he had heard early in the afternoon in the vicinity of the first slide were a party of belated hunters, who had camped in the upper canyon. They must have known of the greater avalanche; possibly of the disaster. They may have sent a messenger to the Springs and kindled this beacon to guide any one who might choose this way to bring the news from the portal. At least they would be able to direct him to the shortest out; serve him the cup of coffee of which he was in need. So, coming to the end of the ridge where the canyons met, he turned in the direction of the fire, and found—two waiting women.
Their presence alone was an explanation. Mrs. Feversham had only to say Lucky Banks had led their party, in the ascent of the peak that brilliant morning, and instantly everything was clear to Tisdale. The voice he had heard from the top of the ridge was not an illusion. She had called him.
"It was snowing," he said, interrupting the story, "but if they left the shadow of a trail, Banks found it. There are two of them, though, and up there—it's cold." Then, having gone a few steps, he remembered the child and came back to put him in Elizabeth's arms. "His father and mother are dead," he explained briefly, "but he hasn't a bruise. When he wakes, he is going to be hungry."
So, forgetting those wearing hours of rescue work, and without the coffee for which he had intended to ask, he started on the prospector's trail. In a little while, as he skirted the foot of the slide, he heard a great commotion on the slope beyond. It was Lucky Banks easing his human toboggan down the last pitch to the canyon floor.
The two men stood a silent moment scanning each other in the uncertain light across that load. Tisdale's eyes were searching for an answer to the question he could not ask, but the prospector, breathing hard, was trying to cover the emotion Tisdale's unexpected appearance had roused.
"Hello, Hollis," he said at last. "Is that you? I had to see after Dave's wife, but I thought likely, when I got her to camp, I'd take a little hike up to the tunnel and look you up."
But Tisdale, not finding the answer for which he looked, sank to his knee beside the load and loosened the straps. Then he lifted a corner of the rug that protected her face, and at the sight of it, so white, so still, his heart cried. "Little soldier!" he said over and over and, as though he hoped to warm them, laid his cheek gently to her blue lips. "You called me! I heard you. I failed you, too!"
Then a fluttering breath steadied him. Instantly the iron in the man cropped through. He felt her pulse, her heart, as though she had been some stranger from the unfortunate train and, moving her to a level place, fixed her head low and began firmly, with exceeding care, those expedients to eliminate the frost and start the circulation that Banks had already hurriedly tried. His great, warm personality enfolded her; he worked tirelessly, as though he was determined to infuse her numb veins with his own vigor. When the prospector would have aided him, he wished to do everything alone, and directed the miner's attention to Frederic Morganstein, who showed signs of returning consciousness.
But the intrepid little man failed to respond. "I guess likely he will pull through," he said dryly. "He had a pretty good shaking up coming down, and I'd better run around to camp and get a bottle of port I cached this morning. The snipe got away with my flask; used the last drop, likely, before she needed it." His voice took a higher pitch, and he added over his shoulder, as he started in the direction of the fire: "He made a windbreak of her."
When he returned presently with the wine, Frederic was filling the night with his complaints and groans. But neither of the men gave him any attention. That was left for Marcia, who had followed the prospector.
Beatriz Weatherbee was still unconscious. She was carried to the camp and laid in a sheltered place remote from the fire. Then Lucky Banks volunteered to go to Scenic Springs with the news of the train disaster, and to bring an extra man with lanterns and a stretcher. He was well on the way when Morganstein crept in. Marcia found him a seat on the end of a log and, wrapping the cached rug about him, regaled him with the recovered portion of the luncheon. But it was long after that when Beatriz Weatherbee's eyelids fluttered open. Tisdale drew a little more into the shadows, waiting, and the first to come within her range of vision was the child. He was sitting on his blanket in the strong glow, and just beyond him Elizabeth, who had found a tin of cream in the cache and had been feeding him, was putting away the cup. Joey faced the waking woman and, catching her look, he put out his hands, rocking gayly, and crowed. Instantly a flash of intelligence lighted her face. She smiled and tried to stretch out her arms. "Come!" she said.
Elizabeth caught up the child and placed him beside her on the rug. He put out his soft, moist fingers, touching her face curiously, with gathering doubt. Then, satisfied this was not his mother, as in the uncertain light he must have supposed, he drew back with a whimper and clung to Elizabeth.
At the same moment Mrs. Weatherbee's smile changed to disappointment. "His eyes are brown, Elizabeth," she said, "and my baby's were blue, like mine." And she turned her face, weeping; not hysterically, like a woman physically unstrung, but with the slow, deep sobs of a woman who has wakened from a dream of one whom she has greatly loved—and buried.