Testing multiple HTML pages with CasperJS?

I'm working with CasperJS on a webpage that has a search box. Using Casper, I'm successfully able to perform a search and see that the form is filled and execute the search, however I'm having trouble specifically getting the number of results to test that it's valid.

When I look at the source of the webpage, I have the XPath of the element and it's nested in a few divs.

But when I try to either do assertExists() on that path, or even return the result of getElementByXPath to a var, it doesn't work.

This is the XPath:

//*[@id="total"]

Here is what the snippet of source looks like:

<div id="pgContent"><div id="results_pagination1_container">
    <span style="float: right; font-size: .9em">
    Found <span id="total">721</span> item(s)</span>
</div>

This is the CasperJS code, relevant to here.

`

casper.test.begin(

    'Testing that we get the right amount of results for a search query',

    2, function suite(test) {
        casper.start(catapult, function() {
            test.assertTitle("Search", "Search"); // Good
            test.assertExists('#input-searchbox'); // Good
            this.fillSelectors('form#inputForm', {
                'input[name="queryStr"]' : 'airplane'
            }, true);

            //this.click('input#btnSearch');
        });
        casper.then(function() {
             var resultsNum = __utils__.getElementByXPath('//*[@id="total"]');
            this.echo(resultsNum);
            test.assertExists('//*[@id="total"]'); 



        });`