I felt for quite a while that we were going to get out; we were battling the snow to get out, but I began to see that they could not battle the clouds away, and I knew, the way my eyes and ears told me, that I was in a very unsafe place.
—John Rogers
Monday, February 28, 1910
Wellington
Morning
For many it was the sound that was most unsettling. Few of the passengers had slept well on Sunday night, and one reason was the eerie, increasingly frequent rumble of avalanches in the distance. After six days of heavy precipitation, the surrounding mountains had simply reached the limit of their capacity to hold any more, and whole snow-fields were now losing their grip on the slopes and plummeting into the canyons below. ‘All day and night you could hear the reports of trees being snapped off by snowslides,” John Rogers recalled. “And on Monday morning the overhanging ledge of snow looked almost ready to tumble.”
His resolve of the previous night shaken, Rogers again sought advice on the pros and cons of braving a hike along the ever more unstable side of Windy Mountain. It had not escaped him that the increasing danger of snowslides cut both ways—it magnified the potential danger of either going or staying. But Rogers could find no consensus among the passengers. One group of Irish mill hands was especially resolute about staying on the train. Having worked in the mountains of Alaska and British Columbia, they felt confident that the trains were in the safest place on the mountain. The fact that scores of railway workers had elected to sleep on the trains’ day coaches and mail cars, rather than in their usual quarters east of the station, lent significant weight to this argument. On the other hand, the apparent success of the previous day’s hikers was a compelling argument for leaving, and so Rogers wavered. “There were so many different opinions,” he said, “a fellow didn’t hardly know what to think.”
His decision was complicated by the lack of any news about weather and trail conditions elsewhere on the mountain. At 9:40 P.M. the previous night, after being operational for only five short hours, the telegraph wires had gone down again. Without a line of communication to the stations at Scenic and Alvin, the people at Wellington were once more on their own. Anyone hiking down the mountain would be heading out into an unknown situation, with no recent information about what to expect on the trail.
By the end of the morning—perhaps because of the determination of conductor Pettit, whom Rogers knew quite well from previous trips over the Cascades—the real estate man finally made his decision: He would go ahead with his original plan to hike out. Although his companion McNeny disagreed, Rogers felt it futile to wait around for the Great Northern to win its fight against the storm. “The only way to get out of there,” he concluded, “was to get out.”
At noon a group consisting of Rogers, Pettit, several of the younger passengers, and a handful of other GN employees set out from the trains into the storm. As they were leaving, the ever-professional Libby Latsch handed Rogers a letter, which she asked him to post once he reached “civilization.” He agreed, and the letter—addressed to the manager of her hair-accessories business, informing him that she was going to be delayed at least several more days—was tucked away in his pocket to be mailed at Skykomish or Seattle. It would arrive at its destination several days later, its terse, businesslike message tragically obsolete.
Once out on the trail, the group encountered another passenger. Edward W Boles, a railroad construction worker from Ontario, had been traveling on train No. 25 with his brother Albert and was now trudging around the Wellington yard, trying to expend some restless energy. Seeing the Rogers party heading off, Boles decided to tag along with them, at least for a while. He was eager to get a look at the slides that had been causing the railroad such trouble. So he joined the hikers, intending to return to his brother on the train after a few hours at the most.
Unfortunately, the weather on the trail was even more forbidding than it had been the day before. “It was snowing so badly,” according to Rogers, “that I could see only with my right eye.” Sunday’s late rain and warmer temperatures, however, had apparently melted or washed away enough snow to make passage easier. With conductor Pettit breaking trail for much of the way, this group made much better time over the slides. Even so, it was a frightening experience, with trees cracking in the wind and snow slipping on the slopes all around them. “I did not realize when I started that there was as much danger in going to Scenic as there was,” said one of the hikers, H. L. Wertz, who soon regretted his decision to leave the train. “But after I got two-thirds of the way, it was easier to go the other third than to go back.”
Here again the most harrowing part of the journey came at the very end—when the hikers had to slide down an avalanche track to Scenic. Leaping from the railroad right-of-way, they dropped down the sheer slope at the speed of a toboggan. One person hit a rock on the way down, and Rogers thought at first that the man had been killed, but the collision was not as serious as it looked: “We all landed in a heap, picked ourselves up, and ran as fast as we could down the road, to avoid the boulders and gigantic snowballs that followed us.”
When they reached the Scenic Hot Springs Hotel (Edward Boles still among them, despite his earlier intention not to leave his brother), they were amazed to find that less than an hour and a half had passed since they’d left the trains. This was about one-third as long as it had taken Jesseph’s group to cover the same ground, convincing Rogers that conditions on the trail had improved sufficiently over the past twenty-four hours to make a passenger evacuation feasible. The able-bodied men could certainly have gotten out, Rogers later testified, “and I believe that they could have carried out the others”—a notion on which Pettit apparently concurred. Accompanying the conductor to the telegraph office, Rogers watched Pettit write out a telegram to the operator at Wellington: “TELL THE PASSENGERS THEY CAN COME OUT OVER THE TRAIL.”
This message, however, did not go through. The wires to Wellington, which had been going in and out of service with maddening frequency, went down just as the Scenic operator was preparing to transmit. Whether or not the telegram’s encouraging message would actually have convinced other passengers to make the hike that day is impossible to say. If so, then the failure of the wires at this critical moment was truly fateful for many of those aboard. For by the time conductor Pettit was able to deliver the same message in person, it was already too late in the day for any further evacuation attempts. Anyone wanting to leave would have to wait until Tuesday morning.
As he arranged for the packing in of supplies to Wellington that afternoon, Joseph Pettit’s own fate was also in the balance. He was at Scenic now, out of danger and a mere hour or two by train from his home near Everett. With the welfare of a wife and five young children to think about, he could surely have justified at least remaining at Scenic for the duration of the crisis, or even heading home. He had been on duty and under enormous stress for six long days now. If anyone could be said to have done his part in this situation already, it was he.
However, Pettit made his difficult choice with no apparent hesitation: After finishing with his arrangements at Scenic, he left the hotel and started off toward the trail. Rogers accompanied him for a few minutes but soon had to turn back. “I told him that I sympathized with him, because he had a difficult task before him,” Rogers remembered. The two men shook hands, and then Rogers watched as his friend began the long, hard climb back up the mountain in the storm.
Q: When did you reach it [the X808]?
A: About noon of the 27th.
Q: And what did you do from then on until the night of the 28th?
A: I rode that machine all that day and all night of the 27th and the day of the 28th.
—:James H. O’Neill
Above Scenic
Monday Afternoon
Sometime on the afternoon of February 28, the X808—the last surviving rotary on the west slope of the GN’s Cascade line—stopped working. The problem this time was not coal; with an extra two carloads in tow, the rotary had fuel enough to last for days. Because of slides that had come down behind the single rotary on Sunday, however, the plow had not been able to get back to Scenic for water. Instead, O’Neill and master mechanic Dowling had ordered the crews to shovel snow into the tank, where it could be melted with a steam hose. While this method had worked for a time, the dirt and debris in the melting slush had eventually clogged the steam engine’s injectors. Now the entire plow had to be idled so that the tank and the injectors could be cleaned—a job that would take at least several hours.
During those several hours, however, the snow continued falling. “Wellington, blowing hard, snowing,” read the 1:00 P.M. weather report in the division’s operations diary. “2′ of new snow.” Over the past six days, in other words, enough new snow had fallen to bury a two-story house. In places the gusting winds had actually drifted the snow far higher.
For O’Neill, this was now a nightmare that simply refused to end. Nothing he had seen in his quarter century of railroading in the Rockies and Cascades had prepared him for such a concentrated and relentless snowfall. This storm had already utterly overwhelmed five of his rotary plows and the efforts of hundreds of men. It had killed two people, had nearly killed a third, and was now threatening the lives of everyone on the line between Leavenworth and Skykomish. Yet still the snow kept falling.
So still James H. O’Neill kept working. The superintendent had been on the rotary for about thirty hours now, trying to give some relief to Dowling, who had been actively plowing since Thursday. After ninety-six straight hours of work, though, Dowling and his crew needed something more than a quick nap on the floor of the rotary to keep going, and so O’Neill had called in replacements from the idled double rotary at Snowshed 2.2. He got a message to Irving Tegtmeier by runner, and now the traveling engineer was heading down the mountain with a crew including Walter Vogel, the conductor of the Fast Mail, and several engineers.
Meanwhile, the rotary he’d called in from the Kalispell Division had finally arrived at Leavenworth and was at work on the east slope. The plow was making extremely slow progress—about a mile every hour, clearing slides as it went—but once it reached Gaynor, it could revive and hook up with Harrington’s abandoned X801, giving them a double rotary to work with again. There was also help of a different sort on the way from the east. On Sunday O’Neill had wired the equivalent of an SOS to company headquarters in St. Paul, only to discover that the general manager of the entire Great Northern Railway, J. M. Gruber, had already left for Washington State. He was reportedly bringing with him some of the highest operations officers in the company, and though O’Neill may have felt some loss of face in having to issue such a cry for help, he had to be feeling relief as well. Once Gruber and the others arrived, O’Neill would no longer be the commander of this operation. Gruber would be the ultimate decision maker—and the person responsible for the consequences of those decisions.
For at this point—sleep deprived and as weary as a man can be—O’Neill would have been well advised to ask himself whether he was indeed making the correct decisions. Certainly the opinion of most of those on the mountain was that his actions in battling the storm were impeccable. “He is a prince,” John Merritt had told a reporter from the Post-Intelligencer after reaching Seattle. Other escaped passengers had seconded the judgment, describing O’Neill’s fight as “little less than heroic.” But in hindsight, one can legitimately question whether the sleep-deprived O’Neill was really thinking as clearly as he should have been. Letting the snow shovelers walk out on Saturday night (when he’d gone five days without a decent sleep) had clearly been a mistake. At that point in the crisis, given the ongoing switchmen’s strike, the Great Northern could ill afford the appearance of putting financial concerns ahead of passenger safety, particularly on a labor issue.
Now O’Neill seemed to be making another questionable choice. With the two trains hopelessly trapped for at least the next several days, he had just spent over thirty hours with Dowling on the X808—time that arguably would have been better used attempting to get the passengers off the mountain on foot. The mishap with Big Jerry Wickham may indeed have soured O’Neill on the idea of evacuation, but conditions on the trail had improved significantly in the thirty hours since then, as demonstrated by Pettit’s ninety-minute journey that morning. An evacuation effort that had seemed impossible on Sunday might have been much easier to accomplish on Monday
Moreover, O’Neill now had enough manpower at his disposal to at least attempt a Plan B for getting the passengers to safety. Many of the idling snow shovelers, while persistent in their demands for unreasonably high wages, were still hanging on at Scenic and Skykomish. (“We only get one chance to make a little money,” John Rogers overheard one of them saying. “Now it will take you about fifty or seventy-five cents an hour if you want to get me.”) He also had the extra men at Scenic who’d arrived on the first relief train on Sunday. And while even a large force of men might not have been able to evacuate the passengers safely through the ever more frequent slides, O’Neill could at least have been exploring this and other options with Pettit and the passengers who so desperately wanted to see him. Instead, he seems to have been entirely focused on the work of this single rotary, which was still, by any realistic estimate, days away from reaching Wellington. This was one situation, then, in which O’Neill’s hands-on, detail-oriented style of command may actually have been working against him.
But there can be no doubt that the superintendent was doing what he thought was right at the time, considering that the X808 was the only part of his fighting force left in the vicinity. The plow would clearly have to be put back into action as soon as possible. Once Tegtmeier arrived with the replacement crew, O’Neill could turn over the rotary to them and move on to the next problem. Until then, he would focus on the problem at hand. There was a tank to be cleaned, an injector to be repaired. If there was one thing O’Neill had learned in his twenty-five years of railroading, it was that even the largest operational challenge had to be broken down and attacked step by step.
The train was warm and we were getting enough to eat, such as it was. … It was beef every day, but that was all right—a man can’t starve to death with beef. … Of course, it was very monotonous, but as soon as it would become dusk in the afternoon, then the fear would begin.
—Henry White
Wellington
Monday Evening
For much of the long day on Monday, as they anxiously awaited word from Pettit, the forty-four passengers remaining on the Seattle Express wandered the coaches in a distracted, irritable state of mind. In an attempt to lighten the mood, a couple of the women had started on a project: “My baby was getting so dirty” Anna Gray would later write, “so Mrs. Covington told me if I would go to the little [hotel] store and buy some cloth, she would help me make Baby some clothes.” Mrs. Gray had found something suitable, and soon the two women were busily sewing a dress and underskirt for little Varden, trying to make the task a source of cheerful interest for everyone on the train.
Despite such efforts, however, many passengers remained morose. Over the past two days the atmosphere on the train had shown signs of turning ugly, even a little surreal. One father apparently lost patience with his fidgety daughter. According to Mrs. Covington’s diary: ‘A man said to his little girl, you sit right there, you’re crippled, you’re crippled in the head where you can’t wear crutches.” One man said wistfully that he had dreamed he was in Seattle, “and another said if he had that dream he’d never want to wake up.”
Inevitable minor annoyances just heightened the uneasiness. After days of immobility, the Seattle Express was becoming more than a little malodorous. Sanitation was a worsening problem, and even the luxurious Pullman sleepers had grown rank and dirty. For drinking water, the passengers had resorted to melting snow on their own (“snow that was taken up right alongside the trail where all those laboring men [were] expectorating,” as Henry White complained). There was a spring in town where Wellington residents got their own water, but somehow the passengers had never been told of it.
Claustrophobia was also a problem for some, since by now the trains were all but completely entombed in snow: “There was a space not over a foot that you could see of the trains … along the windows,” mail clerk A. B. Hensel would later report. “The balance of the trains were buried.” He and his fellow clerks had been keeping informal tabs on the amount of snow that fell every day—in the morning they’d toss an empty mail sack outside the train door and then later dig it up again. They’d been amazed to find that it was consistently snowing as much as three feet a day. The snowfield above the trains was by now a total blank; even the burned trees had been buried under the whiteness. “It was mighty deep,” Hensel remarked. “It looked … to me that it could not stay up there.”
Ida Starrett was particularly distressed about the buildup of snow above the trains, and the coming of rain had only sharpened her distress. She knew nothing of the physics of snowslides, but it seemed clear to her that the weight of extra moisture on those slopes would make them much more likely to slide. Holding tight to the eight-month-old baby in her arms to ward off her growing despondency, she began to speak in almost fatalistic terms about the possibility of a snowslide. Mrs. Covington, too, was succumbing to despair. “I think we are here to stay until spring,” the old woman wrote to her husband. “I am trusting in God to save us.”
This fretful atmosphere eased somewhat with the return of Joe Pettit that afternoon. True to his word, the conductor had made the trip to Scenic and back in a single day, and the news he brought was heartening: the trail was passable, at least for those in reasonable physical condition. This intelligence came too late to be acted upon that day, but many passengers began making plans to leave first thing in the morning. R. M. Barnhart, an attorney, and Charles Eltinge, the former bank vice president, went to the Bailets Hotel and bought rough leggings and a three-days’ supply of food. “We’re going to get out of this,” they told the proprietor, and then carried the leggings back to the Pullman to try on for size. Customs official H. D. Chantrell started asking around for a personal mountain guide (he was referred—one assumes fruitlessly—to trapper Robert Schwartz, the disparager of tenderfeet).
Even Ned Topping had decided to escape. “Still in this snow,” he wrote to his mother on Monday night. “If nothing happens, I expect to leave in the morning for Scenic—down the track for 2 or 3 miles, then down the side of the mountain. There are numbers of people going out, so I’ll have company. Oh, if I ever get out of this place, how happy I will be.”
Henry White, though, was skeptical of the plans afoot. After learning from Pettit that there was no chance of the rotaries reaching them anytime soon, the salesman grew angry that the railroad had not come up with any official alternative plan. Ad hoc preparations among the passengers were all very well, but White realized that getting the old and infirm down that trail would require a massive effort involving ropes, a throng of trailbreakers, and perhaps even some sort of sled or stretcher for certain individuals. Sixty-nine-year-old Mrs. Covington, for one, was not about to hike off the mountain with nothing more than a pair of men’s trousers and a walking stick. For her and for some others aboard (such as J. R. Vail, whose carbuncle, according to Nurse O’Reilly, was now life-threatening), the idea of evacuation on foot was patently far-fetched. In White’s opinion, the only workable plan was to get enough shovelers up from Scenic to move the train to a safer place.
At this point, though, he realized that Joseph Pettit could do nothing more for them. While the conductor implied that the train would indeed be safer near the tunnel, he clearly didn’t want to contradict his superiors. So White and his contingent again began agitating for a personal interview with the superintendent. The clearing of the line could no longer be considered in any way imminent, so there was nothing to prevent O’Neill from sparing a few moments to see them. To emphasize the seriousness of their resolve, they decided to draw up a petition, which would be signed by every passenger willing to do so. The petition, a copy of which still exists, read as follows:
Feb. 28th, 1910
Mr.J.H. O’Neill
Sup’t. Cascade Div. Gt. N. R.R.
Dear Sir:—
We, the undersigned, passengers on train #25, after waiting here six (6) days, and believing it will be impossible to move this train for many days, request that you meet us here, on train tonight, to the end that some means [may be found] by which the passengers can make their way over to Skykomish or to some point this side of there, where they may take trains for their respective destinations.
Passenger Bert Matthews, a traveling salesman from Cincinnati, carried the document over to O’Neill’s business car and typed it up on the superintendent’s own typewriter, probably under the fretful eye of the stenographer Earl Longcoy. The petition was then brought back to the Seattle Express, where it was signed by thirty-four passengers. A carbon copy was given to attorney James McNeny for safekeeping, while the typed original was sent over to the A-16. Having thus made their request official, the passengers retired to the observation car to await the superintendent’s response.
Yet the petition did not produce O’Neill. After a time, Longcoy—at nineteen years of age little more than a boy—came over in the superintendent’s stead. The passengers pounced. “We asked him if he was in authority,” Henry White reported, “and he said that he was. We told him we had sent for Mr. O’Neill. He said Mr. O’Neill was not there. We said we want the next in charge. He said it was Mr. Blackburn. We asked him to send [Blackburn] over, and he said that he was there to represent Mr. Blackburn in the matter.”
Understandably infuriated but seeing no other choice, White and the other passengers decided to deal with the young man. They first demanded that the railroad furnish them with fifty men—roughly one for each passenger—to take people out over the trail, using whatever ropes or equipment would be necessary. Longcoy regarded this as out of the question. “We have only seven men on the payroll at Wellington!” he insisted. But the passengers had heard about the arrival of the relief train at Scenic the day before. According to White: “We knew that 125 men were working with rotary plows near Scenic and we asked that they be sent to our assistance.” When Longcoy again demurred, they asked him to put his refusal in writing. This, too, the young man would not do, claiming that he had no actual authority in the matter. “Well, that is just exactly what we are getting at,” White exclaimed. “We want somebody in authority and not you.”
Utterly intimidated by now, Longcoy retreated, promising to notify Blackburn of their demands. The trainmaster himself arrived a short time later, visibly angered at being called away from his duties. When given the same request to bring up the men now at Scenic, “Mr. Blackburn sort of went up in the air a little,” according to White. Blackburn claimed that there was no way he would redeploy the workers opening the line to come up to Wellington to “take out a lot of able-bodied men.” One of the passengers, R. H. Bethel, insisted that Blackburn provide at least enough men to aid the women and children and invalids, but the trainmaster wouldn’t hear of it. According to passenger R. M. Laville, “I heard Mr. Blackburn tell [the] committee of passengers that any of them who left the train would do so at their own risk—on their own responsibility—and that as far as the women were concerned, he would not allow them to be taken off. He said that if he caught any of us trying to take the women out of there he would use force, if necessary, to avoid it.”
The discussion seems to have cooled off after this heated exchange, with the passengers again returning to the old demand to be moved back to the tunnel. White offered to chop wood himself to provide the required fuel. There was “plenty of wood,” he claimed. “The mountains were full of it.” The short-tempered salesman even proposed knocking down the Wellington freight house for firewood. This idea was also parried by the trainmaster, but Blackburn did leave that night having made at least one important concession: Though he would not divert any of the men working with the rotary near Scenic, he did agree to provide a handful of men—as many as he could muster at Wellington—to assist the able-bodied male passengers who wished to leave on foot the following morning. He also promised to see about getting some fresh water and taking care of the train’s sanitation problems for those who remained behind.
After Blackburn’s departure, the gloomy mood dissipated considerably. Somehow the trainmaster’s final concessions had put a brighter light on the overall situation, and spirits lifted accordingly. “Nearly everyone on the stalled trains was gay that last night,” brakeman Ross Phillips recalled. “Many of the crew, laborers, and the railway clerks played cards, and some of the section hands went down to Bailets’ saloon for a few drinks. H. H. White and a group of men and women had quite a hilarious social party in the observation car.” George Davis dressed three-year-old Thelma in her fanciest outfit for the occasion, and hotel proprietor Bailets even roasted a chicken (probably one of the last in his larder), which was shared among the passengers and a few of the railroaders who had chosen to sleep in the berths vacated by passengers in the first two groups of hikers.
The party went on for hours. The revelers told stories, gave dramatic recitations, performed tricks for the children, and joined in groups to sing hymns and popular songs. Even Mrs. Covington sang, performing “a sweet little song about the sparrows—something about [how] God took care of the sparrows [so] He would surely take care of us, and it was such a comfort.” There was doubtless something a little forced in the celebration—the glow of the festive train like a tiny, somewhat feeble oasis of light and warmth in the tempestuous night—but it served as a welcome distraction from the snowfields disintegrating all around them.
At the same time, final preparations were being made for tomorrow’s departure. Nellie Sharp and Libby Latsch, having decided to ignore Blackburn’s ban on women walking out, were going around the train cars in search of men’s clothing for the trip. They seemed giddy at the thought of exchanging their skirts and starched shirtwaists for straight-cut trousers and shapeless overcoats. Conductor Pettit, for his part, trudged up to the hotel to arrange an early breakfast for the hikers, and Sharp even obtained a meat chopper so that the group might start the day with a nourishing warm hash.
At about 10:30 the passengers and railroaders finally began retiring for the night, though even then the gaiety continued. “When we lay in our berths,” brakeman Phillips recalled, “we grabbed the hats off any of the gals who walked down the aisle of the sleeper. Even Mrs. Starrett was boisterous, waving and shouting to the men from the second sleeper.” Only one person seemed immune to this outbreak of high spirits: “I don’t believe anyone had a premonition of immediate danger except my partner McDonald,” Phillips said, referring to brakeman Archie McDonald. “We had all been having such a good time and lots of laughs, but just before Mac went to sleep he said to me from his berth across the aisle, ‘We’re all happy now. We may be crying before morning.’”
Most others, however, seemed focused on the promise of tomorrow’s escape. In his berth, Ned Topping finished the day’s entry in the letter to his mother: “I’ll have so much to tell you of my experiences when I get home,” he wrote, turning again to thoughts of his distant family. “Oh, for a look at little Bill and you all … I’ll be so so happy …”
Toward 1:00, when most had already settled into their berths, Pettit came through the train once more. Henry White and Bert Matthews were still in the lounge, talking and smoking after their game of whist, and Pettit stopped to speak with them. White had decided to attempt the hike out, depending on what the weather looked like the next day, so he asked Pettit what he thought of the prospects. The conductor expressed some concern about the wind, which was rising again. “If this wind continues,” he said, “we won’t get out of here tomorrow.” Curious, the men went with him out onto the open vestibule of the car to get a look at the surrounding mountains. This was still, despite everything that had happened over the past six days, an undeniably magnificent setting. “The mountainside was a very beautiful sight,” Henry White would later admit. “The snow had fallen so long, and so much of it, that it had covered up all blemishes or disfigurements, and it was just a big, solid mass of pure white snow. It was a sight that you could not pass without being attracted to [it]—you would have to look at it.”
The men returned inside after a time and got ready for bed. Soon porter Lucius Anderson was making his final pass through the silent Pullman, cleaning up the empty glasses and extinguishing the lights.
It was probably at about this same moment—at the resort hotel standing a short but incalculably long four miles down the mountain at Scenic Hot Springs—that James H. O’Neill was himself bedding down for the night. After being relieved at the rotary by the arrival of traveling engineer Tegtmeier, the superintendent had climbed down to Scenic to get what was to be his second full night’s sleep since the crisis started. There can be little doubt that he needed the rest. The pace he’d been keeping for the past week was brutal, and in the current circumstances, with only one rotary left to assault the endless slides, his task seemed to border on futility. Yet the only alternative to continuing the fight would have been to give up and wait for the storm to end—something that a man of O’Neill’s temperament simply could not do.
So O’Neill was going to bed like everyone else. By now, he knew, Berenice would have been feeling his absence keenly. He had doubtless been wiring her whenever he could spare a moment, to let her know that he was safe at least. Each of his telegrams must have come as an enormous relief to her, knowing as she did the constant danger of working out in that fickle terrain. But the news she was most eager to hear—that he was coming home—was something her husband could not yet tell her. With an entire railroad division to get moving again, his job was nowhere near finished. Which is why—early the next morning, after a scant few hours of sleep—he would get up from bed and start all over again. He would organize the relief party at Scenic, make a final check on the X808, and then hike back up the mountain to Wellington. There were still scores of passengers up there relying on him, and as long as a single one of them was trapped in those mountains he would be trapped there too.