"I'll have to leave the team as near to it as I can get, and walk in to tell Reggie and Mabel that I've come for them," Joe decided.
The highway crossed the railroad track a short distance from the end of the cut nearest Riverside, and Joe, halting a moment to listen, and to make sure no trains were approaching, drove over the rails.
"Though there isn't much danger, now, of a train getting through that," he said to himself, as he saw the big drift of snow that blocked the cut. Behind that drift was the stalled train, he reflected, and then, as he looked at the white mound, he realized that he had made a mistake.
"I can never get through that drift myself," he said. "I'll have to drive up to the other end of the cut, by which the engine and cars entered. Stupid of me not to have thought of that at first."
He turned his horses, and again sought the highway that led along the cut, parallel to it, and about a quarter of a mile distant. Joe listened, again hoping he could hear the whistle of the approaching rescue-train, for at the station he had been told one was being fitted out, and would carry a gang of snow shovelers. But the howl of the wind was all that came to his ears.
"This means another mile of travel," Joe thought, as he urged on the horses. "It will be pitch dark by the time I get back to town with them. I hope Mabel doesn't take cold. It sure is bitter."
Joe found the going even harder as he kept on, but he would not give up now.
"There's one consolation," he reasoned, "the wind will be at our backs going home. That will make it easier."
The road that crossed the track at the other end of Deep Rock Cut was farther from the beginning of the defile, and Joe, leaving the horses in a sheltering clump of trees, struggled down the track, the rails of which were out of sight under the snow.
"I wonder if Mabel can walk back?" he said aloud. "If not I guess Reggie and I can carry her. It's pretty deep. I didn't get here any too soon."