"Ruth had matches, I know," said Tom.
"Oh, we'll find them safe and sound," declared the guide.
One of Long Jerry's prophecies was fulfilled within the hour. The storm broke. Tom had aroused his friends and the three boys had enlarged the tunnel through the snow from the back porch into the yard, and were shoveling a passageway to the stables. The last flakes of the blizzard fluttered down upon them, and the tail of the gale blew the clouds to tatters and revealed the almost black sky with the stars sparkling like points of living fire.
"Hurrah!" cried Bob Steele. "It's over!"
The guide and the two other men were already getting on their snowshoes, having eaten hurriedly by the kitchen fire. They started out at once to rouse the neighbors. By sunrise the sky was entirely clear and the visitors to the backwoods could climb to the second floor gallery of the lodge and look out over the great drifts. In places the snow was heaped fifteen feet high; but the men shuffled off over these drifts and back again as easily as they would have walked on six inches of snow.
They brought with them six other men, who also sat down to breakfast in the big kitchen, while Mr. Cameron and the boys and Mrs. Murchiston finished their meal in the dining-room. To the surprise of the visitors to the camp, one of the men whom Long Jerry had brought in to help find the girls was the Rattlesnake Man, as he was called.
"We found him poking about the woods by himself, sir," said Long Jerry, privately, to Mr. Cameron. "He says there's been a boy staying with him for a while back, and that he started out hunting just before the storm. The old hermit was looking for him. By what he says, I believe it's the same boy you folks was bringing up here-the one that claims to be Fred Hatfield."
"That poor fellow may have lost himself in the blizzard, too, eh?" returned the merchant. "Let us hope we will find them all safely."
In fifteen minutes the whole party started from the lodge on snowshoes, the boys dragging their toboggans and the men carrying food and hot coffee in vacuum bottles. They separated into four parties; the three boys and Jerry Todd kept together. Jerry believed that the girls would have drifted some with the storm and therefore he struck off due east from the house.
In an hour they came back to the bank of the stream near where Ruth and Reno had their adventure with the panther.