There was aroused a sudden and alarmed interest, followed by a hurrying of men to the different platforms, but there was nothing to be seen. The man must have slipped from the train, unobserved, before the recurrence of the storm and made the desperate attempt to reach his home by the exercise of sheer bulldog tenacity and brute force, in struggling through the enormous drifts. Stafford, accompanied by two of the trainmen, made a brief but arduous and difficult search for some distance, but found slight trace of the missing passenger. Close beside the train they discovered where he had leaped off and staggered uncertainly forward, but beyond that there was no sign. The snow had already hidden the reckless being's trail. There was a sequel, long in coming. Late in the following spring, when the looming drifts of the pass had melted, the mortal part of the Storekeeper was found some distance from the track, where he had stumbled blindly in his wanderings. But of his fate there could, of course, at this time, be no certain knowledge. There was even a chance, some thought, that he might accomplish the seemingly impossible. The men muttered to each other, and that was all. Why the Storekeeper, apparently one possessed of shrewdness at least, should have taken such awful risk no one could say--but it made swift tragedy. Communication had been maintained with Belden. A path to the telegraph pole utilized by Stafford on the night of the stoppage had been laboriously dug by the trainmen and Stafford had again made the connection and learned the condition of affairs with the rescuing party already started. The report was not altogether encouraging. The vast fall of snow in the canyon, drifted, in some places, higher than the top of the smokestack of the locomotive--for this was the greatest blockade in the history of the road--had proved more than baffling, even with the snow-plow. Scores of men were at work ahead of it with shovels, in the work of bringing the clearance within the range of its capability. The relief train was yet many miles from the one entirely helpless. Still the snow would not be so deep at points ahead, where the canyon widened, and the belief of the rescuers was that the half-entombed would be reached at some hour of the fourth day of their detention. The news was not received with any degree of exultation. It was at this crisis that Moses appeared to lead those in the Cassowary and their visitors out of the gloom oppressing them. When men and women of intelligence and brightness and modern perception are cast together in an emergency, there ever appears among them some one who brings the group close together. He may not be the greatest of the group, but he has some dominant instinct in him involving a regard for the comfort of others. Such a man was Colonel Livingston.