The plane message about the fire was still a mystery. It remained so for several months, until Ost finally got it explained. The message had been one of several dropped from a plane by a Forest Service guy, Otto H. Ost, in 1957 to instruct a ground crew to proceed to a fire a couple of hundred miles from the Madison Canyon. The streamer, Otto Ost figured, had been found, returned, and sent out without removing the two-year-old message. The note from Ost to Ost was a powerful coincidence. “Doesn’t it strike you as almost planned?” Rev. Ost said when he got the explanation. At 11:30 A. M. the two Forest Service smokejumpers, part of a group of eight who’d jumped farther up the canyon, hiked in. They had first aid equipment and food. They reassured the group that a helicopter was on its way to rescue them. Shortly after noon, the Johnson Flying Service helicopter arrived, landing precariously on the canyon-side slope. Mrs. Ost and George Whitmore, the Fredericks nephew, both with eye injuries, were the first two taken out. The helicopter ferried them over the slide to a point on the highway where Highway Patrol cars sped them—at 80 miles an hour where rocks hadn’t made the road hazardous—to Ennis, to medical care, comfort, and safety. By the time the helicopter had taken seventeen of the group over, the turbulence of an oncoming storm made the air so treacherous that the four remaining men walked up the canyon, were driven to a safer landing point at the upper end of the canyon. They saw the cracks and damage at Hebgen Dam. The helicopter picked them up, and they joined their families in Ennis. “We’d lost our money, our cars, our clothes,” Mrs. Fredericks said. “The Red Cross didn’t ask us any questions about whether we had any money or not. They just helped. They sent us to stores and got us all two complete outfits. They told us to make any calls home—to our relatives—that we wanted to. And they’re flying us home. “We’re certainly going to be ardent Red Cross workers from now on!” That night they stayed—dormitory style in the Ennis High School Gym—as Mrs. Fredericks put it, “An anvil chorus, each snoring in his own language.” Conditioned by the quake of the night before, when the town siren blasted off at 9:00 P. M. the quake victims jumped out of bed in alarm and hastily dressed. Even after the siren was explained as the regular nightly curfew signal, Mrs. Fredericks slept the rest of the night in her clothes. “I’m damned if I’m going to be caught in my pajamas again,” she said. The Osts moved up to the Shermont Motel in Sheridan, where Mrs. Ost recuperated from her face and eye injury. Miraculously, though the whole side of her face was massively bruised, no bones were broken. That Saturday they were guests of the Madison County Fair at Twin Bridges. On Sunday the Red Cross flew them from Butte back to their homes in New York.