Dorne motioned Avery to the aisle, where already some of the passengers, having settled their belongings in their sections, were beginning to wander through the cars seeking acquaintances or players to make up a card game. Eaton, however, was not among these. On the contrary, when these approached him in his section, he frankly avoided chance of their speaking to him, by an appearance of complete immersion in his own concerns. The Englishman directly across the aisle from Eaton clearly was not likely to speak to him, or to anybody else, without an introduction; the red-haired man, "D. S.," however, seemed a more expansive personality. Eaton, seeing "D. S." look several times in his direction, pulled a newspaper from the pocket of his overcoat and engrossed himself in it; the newspaper finished, he opened his traveling bag and produced a magazine.
But as the train settled into the steady running which reminded of the days of travel ahead during which the half-dozen cars of the train must create a world in which it would be absolutely impossible to avoid contact with other people, Eaton put the magazine into his traveling bag, took from the bag a handful of cigars with which he filled a plain, uninitialed cigar-case, and went toward the club and observation car in the rear. As he passed through the sleeper next to him,—the last one,—Harriet Dorne glanced up at him and spoke to her father; Dorne nodded but did not look up. Eaton went on into the wide-windowed observation-room beyond, which opened onto the rear platform protected on three sides.
The observation-room was nearly empty. The sleet which had been falling when they left Seattle had changed to huge, heavy flakes of fast-falling snow, which blurred the windows, obscured the landscape and left visible only the two thin black lines of track that, streaming out behind them, vanished fifty feet away in the white smother. The only occupants of the room were a young woman who was reading a magazine, and an elderly man. Eaton chose a seat as far from these two as possible.
He had been there only a few minutes, however, when, looking up, he saw Harriet Dorne and Avery enter the room. They passed him, engaged in conversation, and stood by the rear door looking out into the storm. It was evident to Eaton, although he did not watch them, that they were arguing something; the girl seemed insistent, Avery irritated and unwilling. Her manner showed that she won her point finally. She seated herself in one of the chairs, and Avery left her. He wandered, as if aimlessly, to the reading table, turning over the magazines there; abandoning them, he gazed about as if bored; then, with a wholly casual manner, he came toward Eaton and took the seat beside him.
"Rotten weather, isn't it?" Avery observed somewhat ungraciously.
Eaton could not well avoid reply. "It's been getting worse," he commented, "ever since we left Seattle."
"We're running into it, apparently." Again Avery looked toward Eaton and waited.
"It'll be bad in the mountains, I suspect," Eaton said.
"Yes—lucky if we get through."
The conversation on Avery's part was patently forced; and it was equally forced on Eaton's; nevertheless it continued. Avery introduced the war and other subjects upon which men, thrown together for a time, are accustomed to exchange opinions. But Avery did not do it easily or naturally; he plainly was of the caste whose pose it is to repel, not seek, overtures toward a chance acquaintance. His lack of practice was perfectly obvious when at last he asked directly: "Beg pardon, but I don't think I know your name."
Eaton was obliged to give it.
"Mine's Avery," the other offered; "perhaps you heard it when we were getting our berths assigned."
And again the conversation, enjoyed by neither of them, went on. Finally the girl at the end of the car rose and passed them, as though leaving the car. Avery looked up.
"Where are you going, Harry?"
"I think some one ought to be with Father."
"I'll go in just a minute."
She had halted almost in front of them. Avery, hesitating as though he did not know what he ought to do, finally arose; and as Eaton observed that Avery, having introduced himself, appeared now to consider it his duty to present Eaton to Harriet Dorne, Eaton also arose. Avery murmured the names. Harriet Dorne, resting her hand on the back of Avery's chair, joined in the conversation. As she replied easily and interestedly to a comment of Eaton's, Avery suddenly reminded her of her father. After a minute, when Avery—still ungracious and still irritated over something which Eaton could not guess—rather abruptly left them, she took Avery's seat; and Eaton dropped into his chair beside her.
Now, this whole proceeding—though within the convention which, forbidding a girl to make a man's acquaintance directly, says nothing against her making it through the medium of another man—had been so unnaturally done that Eaton understood that Harriet Dorne deliberately had arranged to make his acquaintance, and that Avery, angry and objecting, had been overruled.
She seemed to Eaton less alertly boyish now than she had looked an hour before when they had boarded the train. Her cheeks were smoothly rounded, her lips rather full, her lashes very long. He could not look up without looking directly at her, for her chair, which had not been moved since Avery left it, was at an angle with his own. A faint, sweet fragrance from her hair and clothing came to him and made him recollect how long it was—five years—since he had talked with, or even been near, such a girl as this; and the sudden tumult of his pulses which her nearness caused warned him to keep watch of what he said until he had learned why she had sought him out.
To avoid the appearance of studying her too openly, he turned slightly, so that his gaze went past her to the white turmoil outside the windows.
"It's wonderful," she said, "isn't it?"
"You mean the storm?" A twinkle of amusement came to Eaton's eyes. "It would be more interesting if it allowed a little more to be seen. At present there is nothing visible but snow."
"Is that the only way it affects you?" She turned to him, apparently a trifle disappointed.
"I don't exactly understand."
"Why, it must affect every man most as it touches his own interests. An artist would think of it as a background for contrasts—a thing to sketch or paint; a writer as something to be written down in words."
Eaton understood. She could not more plainly have asked him what he was.
"And an engineer, I suppose," he said, easily, "would think of it only as an element to be included in his formulas—anx, or ana, or ab, to be put in somewhere and square-rooted or squared so that the roof-truss he was figuring should not buckle under its weight."
"Oh—so that is the way you were thinking of it?"
"You mean," Eaton challenged her directly, "am I an engineer?"
"Are you?"
"Oh, no; I was only talking in pure generalities, just as you were."
"Let us go on, then," she said gayly. "I see I can't conceal from you that I am doing you the honor to wonder what you are. A lawyer would think of it in the light of damage it might create and the subsequent possibilities of litigation." She made a little pause. "A business man would take it into account, as he has to take into account all things in nature or human; it would delay transportation, or harm or aid the winter wheat."
"Or stop competition somewhere," he observed, more interested.
The flash of satisfaction which came to her face and as quickly was checked and faded showed him she thought she was on the right track.
"Business," she said, still lightly, "will—how is it the newspapers put it?—will marshal its cohorts; it will send out its generals in command of brigades of snowplows, its colonels in command of regiments of snow-shovelers and its spies to discover and to bring back word of the effect upon the crops."
"You talk," he said, "as if business were a war."
"Isn't it?—like war, but war in higher terms."
"In higher terms?" he questioned, attempting to make his tone like hers, but a sudden bitterness now was betrayed by it. "Or in lower?"
"Why, in higher," she declared, "demanding greater courage, greater devotion, greater determination, greater self-sacrifice."
"What makes you say that?"
"Soldiers themselves say it, Mr. Eaton, and all the observers in this horrible war say it when they say that they find almost no cowards and very few weaklings among all the millions of every sort of men at the front. They could not say the same of those identical millions under the normal conditions of everyday business life."
He remained silent, though she waited for him to reply.
"You know that is so, Mr. Eaton," she said. "One has only to look on the streets of any great city to find thousands of men who have not had the courage and determination to carry on their share of the ordinary duties of life. Recruiting officers can pick any man off the streets and make a good soldier of him, but no one could be so sure of finding a satisfactory employee in that way. Doesn't that show that daily life, the everyday business of earning a living and bearing one's share in the workaday world, demands greater qualities than war?"
Her face had flushed eagerly as she spoke; a darker, livid flush answered her words on his.
"But the opportunities for evil are greater, too," he asserted almost fiercely.
"What do you mean?"
"For deceit, for lies, for treachery, Miss Dorne! Violence is the evil of war, and violence is the evil most easily punished, even if it does not bring its own punishment upon itself. But how many of those men you speak of on the streets have been deliberately, mercilessly, even savagely sacrificed to some business expediency, their future destroyed, their hope killed!" Some storm of passion, whose meaning she could not divine, was sweeping him.
"You mean," she asked after an instant's silence, "that you, Mr. Eaton, have been sacrificed in such a way?"
"I am still talking in generalities," he denied ineffectively.
He saw that she sensed the untruthfulness of these last words. Her smooth young forehead and her eyes were shadowy with thought. Eaton was uneasily silent. The train roared across some trestle, giving a sharp glimpse of gray, snow-swept water far below. Finally Harriet Dorne seemed to have made her decision.
"I think you should meet my father, Mr. Eaton," she said. "Would you like to?"
He did not reply at once. He knew that his delay was causing her to study him now with greater surprise.
"I would like to meet him, yes," he said, "but,"—he hesitated, tried to avoid answer without offending her, but already he had affronted her,—"but not now, Miss Dorne."
She stared at him, rebuffed and chilled.
"You mean—" The sentence, obviously, was one she felt it better not to finish. As though he recognized that now she must wish the conversation to end, he got up. She rose stiffly.
"I'll see you into your car, if you're returning there," he offered.
Neither spoke, as he went with her into the next car; and at the section where her father sat, Eaton bowed silently, nodded to Avery, who coldly returned his nod, and left her. Eaton went on into his own car and sat down, his thoughts in mad confusion.
How near he had come to talking to this girl about himself, even though, he had felt from the first that that was what she was trying to make him do! Was he losing his common sense? Was the self-command on which he had so counted that he had dared to take this train deserting him? He felt that he must not see Harriet Dorne again alone. At first this was all he felt; but as he sat, pale and quiet, staring vacantly at the snow-flakes which struck and melted on the window beside him, his thoughts grew more clear. In Avery he had recognized, by that instinct which so strangely divines the personalities one meets, an enemy from the start; Dorne's attitude toward him, of course, was not yet defined; as for Harriet Dorne—he could not tell whether she was prepared to be his enemy or friend.
The Eastern Express, mantled in a seething whirl of snow, but still maintaining very nearly its scheduled time and even regaining a few lost minutes from hour to hour as, now well past the middle of the State, it sped on across the flatter country in its approach to the mountains, proceeded monotonously through the afternoon. Eaton watched the chill of the snow battle against the warmth of the double windows on the windward side of the car, until finally it conquered and the windows became—as he knew the rest of the outside of the cars must have been long before—merely a wall of white. This coating, thickening steadily with the increasing severity of the storm as they approached the Rockies, dimmed the afternoon daylight within the car to dusk.
Presently all became black outside the windows, and the passengers from the rear cars filed forward to the dining car and then back to their places again. Eaton took care to avoid the Dorne party in the diner. Soon the porter began making up the berths to be occupied that night; but as yet no one was retiring. The train was to reach Spokane late in the evening; there would be a stop there for half an hour; and after the long day on the train, every one seemed to be waiting up for a walk about the station before going to bed. But as the train slowed, and with a sudden diminishing of the clatter of the fishplates under its wheels and of the puffings of exhausted steam, slipped into the lighted trainsheds at the city, Eaton sat for some minutes in thought. Then he dragged his overcoat down from its hook, buttoned it tightly about his throat, pulled his traveling cap down on his head and left the car. All along the train, vestibule doors of the Pullmans had been opened, and the passengers were getting out, while a few others, snow-covered and with hand-luggage, came to board the train. Eaton, turning to survey the sleet-shrouded car he had left, found himself face to face with Miss Dorne, standing alone upon the station platform.
Her piquant, beautiful face was half hidden in the collar of the great fur coat she had worn on boarding the train, and her cheeks were ruddy with the bite of the crisp air.
"You see before you a castaway," she volunteered, smiling.
He felt it necessary to take the same tone. "A castaway?" he questioned. "Cast away by whom?"
"By Mr. Avery, if you must know, though your implication that anybody should have cast me away—anybody at all, Mr. Eaton—is unpleasant."
"There was no implication; it was simply inquiry."
"You should have put it, then, in some other form; you should have asked how I came to be in so surprising a position."
"'How,' in this part of the country, Miss Dorne, is not regarded as a question, but merely as a form of salutation," he bantered. "It was formerly employed by the Indian aborigines inhabiting these parts, who exchanged 'How's' when passing each other on the road. If I had said 'How,' you might simply have replied 'How,' and I should have been under the necessity of considering the incident closed."
She laughed. "You do not wish it to be closed."
"Not till I know more about it."
"Very well; you shall know more. Mr. Avery brought me out to take a walk. He remembered, after bringing me as far as this, that we had not asked my father whether he had any message to be sent from here or any commission to execute; so he went back to find out. I have now waited so many minutes that I feel sure it is my father who has detained him. The imperfectly concealed meaning of what I am telling you is that I consider that Mr. Avery, by his delay, has forfeited his right. The further implication—forIdo imply things, Mr. Eaton—is that you cannot very well avoid offering to take the post of duty he has abandoned."
"You mean walk with you?"
"I do."
He slipped his hand inside her arm, sustaining her slight, active body against the wind which blew strongly through the station and scattered over them snow-flakes blown from the roofs of the cars, as they walked forward along the train. Her manner had told him that she meant to ignore her resentment of the morning; but as, turning, they commenced to walk briskly up and down the platform, he found he was not wholly right in this.
"You must admit, Mr. Eaton, that I am treating you very well."
"In pardoning an offense where no offense was meant?"
"It is partly that—that I realized no offense was meant. Partly it is because I do not pass judgment on things I do not understand. I could imagine no possible reason for your very peculiar refusal."
"Not even that I might be perhaps the sort of person who ought not to be introduced into your party in quite that way?"
"That least of all. Persons of that sort do not admit themselves to be such; and if I have lived for twen—I shall not tell you just how many years—the sort of life I have been obliged to live almost since I was born, without learning to judge men in that respect, I must have failed to use my opportunities."
"Thank you," he returned quietly; then, as he recollected his instinctive prejudice against Avery: "However, I am not so sure."
She plainly waited for him to go on, but he pretended to be concerned wholly with guiding her along the platform.
"Mr. Eaton!"
"Yes."
"Do you know that you are a most peculiar man?"
"Exactly in what way, Miss Dorne?"
"In this: The ordinary man, when a woman shows any curiosity about himself, answers with a fullness and particularity and eagerness which seems to say, 'At last you have found a subject which interests me!'"
"Does he?"
"Is that the only reply you care to make?"
"I can think of none more adequate."
"Meaning that after my altogether too open display of curiosity regarding you, I can still do nothing better than guess, without any expectation that you, on your part, will deign to tell me whether I am right or wrong. Very well; my first guess is that you have not done much walking with young women on station platforms—certainly not much of late."
"I'll try to do better, if you'll tell me how you know that?"
"You do very well. I was not criticising you, and I don't have to tell why. Ask no questions; it is a clairvoyant diviner who is speaking."
"Divinity?"
"Diviner only. My second guess is that you have been abroad in far lands."
"My railroad ticket showed as much as that."
"Pardon me, if it seriously injures your self-esteem; but I was not sufficiently interested in you when you came aboard the train, to observe your ticket. What I know is divined from the exceedingly odd and reminiscent way in which you look at all things about you—at this train, this station, the people who pass."
"You find nothing reminiscent, I suppose, in the way I look at you?"
"You do yourself injustice. You do not look at me at all, so I cannot tell; but there could hardly be any reminiscence extending beyond this morning, since you never saw me before then."
"No; this is all fresh experience."
"I hope it is not displeasing. My doubt concerning your evidently rather long absence abroad is as to whether you went away to get or to forget."
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand."
"Those are the two reasons for which young men go to Asia, are they not?—to get something or to forget something. At least, so I have been given to understand. Shall I go on?"
"Go on guessing, you mean? I don't seem able to prevent it."
"Then my third guess is this—and you know no one is ever allowed more than three guesses." She hesitated; when she went on, she had entirely dropped her tone of banter. "I guess, Mr. Eaton, that you have been—I think, are still—going through some terrible experience which has endured for a very long time—perhaps even for years—and has nearly made of you and perhaps even yet may make of you something far different and—and something far less pleasing than you—you must have been before. There! I have transcended all bounds, said everything I should not have said, and left unsaid all the conventional things which are all that our short acquaintance could have allowed. Forgive me—because I'm not sorry."
He made no answer. They walked as far as the rear of the train, turned and came back before she spoke again:
"What is it they are doing to the front of our train, Mr. Eaton?"
He looked. "They are putting a plow on the engine."
"Oh!"
"That seems to be only the ordinary push-plow, but if what I have been overhearing is correct, the railroad people are preparing to give you one of the minor exhibitions of that everyday courage of which you spoke this morning, Miss Dorne."
"In what particular way?"
"When we get across the Idaho line and into the mountains, you are to ride behind a double-header driving a rotary snow-plow."
"A double-header? You mean two locomotives?"
"Yes; the preparation is warrant that what is ahead of us in the way of travel will fully come up to anything you may have been led to expect." They stood a minute watching the trainmen; as they turned, his gaze went past her to the rear cars. "Also," he added, "Mr. Avery, with his usual gracious pleasure at my being in your company, is hailing you from the platform of your car."
She looked up at Eaton sharply, seemed about to speak, and then checked what was upon her tongue. "You are going into your own car?" She held out to him her small gloved hand. "Good-by, then—until we see one another again."
"Good night, Miss Dorne."
He took her hand and retaining it hardly the fraction of an instant, let it go. Was it her friendship she had been offering him? Men use badinage without respect to what their actual feelings may be; women—some memory from the past in which he had known such girls as this, seemed to recall—use it most frequently when their feelings, consciously or unconsciously, are drawing toward a man.
Eaton now went into the men's compartment of his car, where he sat smoking till after the train was under way again. The porter looked in upon him there to ask if he wished his berth made up now; Eaton nodded assent, and fifteen minutes later, dropping the cold end of his cigar and going out into the car, he found the berth ready for him. "D. S.'s" section, also made up but with the curtains folded back displaying the bedding within, was unoccupied; jerkings of the curtains, and voices and giggling in the two berths at the end of the car, showed that Amy and Constance were getting into bed; the Englishman was wide awake in plain determination not to go to bed until his accustomed Nottingham hour. Eaton, drawing his curtains together and buttoning them from the inside, undressed and went to bed. A half-hour later the passage of some one through the aisle and the sudden dimming of the crack of light which showed above the curtains told him that the lights in the car had been turned down. Eaton closed his eyes, but sleep was far from him.
Presently he began to feel the train beginning to labor with the increasing grade and the deepening snow. It was well across the State line and into Idaho; it was nearing the mountains, and the weather was getting colder and the storm more severe. Eaton lifted the curtain from the window beside him and leaned on one elbow to look out. The train was running through a bleak, white desolation; no light and no sign of habitation showed anywhere. Eaton lay staring out, and now the bleak world about him seemed to assume toward him a cruel and merciless aspect. The events of the day ran through his mind again with sinister suggestion. He had taken that train for a certain definite, dangerous purpose which required his remaining as obscure and as inconspicuous as possible; yet already he had been singled out for attention. So far, he was sure, he had received no more than that—attention, curiosity concerning him. He had not suffered recognition; but that might come at any moment. Could he risk longer waiting to act?
He dropped on his back upon the bed and lay with his hands clasped under his head, his eyes staring up at the roof of the car.
In the card-room of the observation car, playing and conversation still went on for a time; then it diminished as one by one the passengers went away to bed. Connery, looking into this car, found it empty and the porter cleaning up; he slowly passed on forward through the train, stopping momentarily in the rear Pullman opposite the berth of the passenger whom President Jarvis had commended to his care. His scrutiny of the car told him all was correct here; the even breathing within the berth assured him the passenger slept.
Connery went on through to the next car and paused again outside the berth occupied by Eaton. He had watched Eaton all day with results that still he was debating with himself; he had found in a newspaper the description of the man who had waited at Warden's, and he reread it, comparing it with Eaton. It perfectly confirmed Connery's first impression; but the more Connery had seen of Eaton, and the more he had thought over him during the day, the more the conductor had become satisfied that either Eaton was not the man described or, if he was, there was no harm to come from it. After all, was not all that could be said against Eaton—if he was the man—simply that he had not appeared to state why Warden was befriending him? Was it not possible that he was serving Warden in some way by not appearing? Certainly Mr. Dorne, who was the man most on the train to be considered, had satisfied himself that Eaton was fit for an acquaintance; Connery had seen what was almost a friendship, apparently, spring up between Eaton and Dorne's daughter during the day.
The conductor went on, his shoulders brushing the buttoned curtains on both sides of the narrow aisle. Except for the presence of the passenger in the rear sleeper, this inspection was to the conductor the uttermost of the commonplace; in its monotonous familiarity he had never felt any strangeness in this abrupt and intimate bringing together of people who never had seen one another before, who after these few days of travel together, might probably never see one another again, but who now slept separated from one another and from the persons passing through the cars by no greater protection than these curtains designed only to shield them from the light and from each other's eyes. He felt no strangeness in this now. He merely assured himself by his scrutiny that within his train all was right. Outside—
Connery was not so sure of that; rather, he had been becoming more certain hour by hour all through the evening, that they were going to have great difficulty in getting the train through. Though he knew by President Jarvis' note that the officials of the road must be watching the progress of this especial train with particular interest, he had received no train-orders from the west for several hours. His inquiry at the last stop had told him the reason for this; the telegraph wires to the west had gone down. To the east, communication was still open, but how long it would remain so he could not guess. Here in the deep heart of the great mountains—they had passed the Idaho boundary-line into Montana—they were getting the full effect of the storm; their progress, increasingly slow, was broken by stops which were becoming more frequent and longer as they struggled on. As now they fought their way slower and slower up a grade, and barely topping it, descended the opposite slope at greater speed as the momentum of the train was added to the engine-power, Connery's mind went back to the second sleeper with its single passenger, and he spoke to the Pullman conductor, who nodded and went toward that car. The weather had prevented the expected increase of their number of passengers at Spokane; only a few had got aboard there; there were worse grades ahead, in climbing which every pound of weight would count; so Connery—in the absence of orders and with Jarvis' note in his pocket—had resolved to drop the second sleeper.
At Fracroft—the station where he was to exchange the ordinary plow which so far had sufficed, and couple on the "rotary" to fight the mountain drifts ahead—he swung himself down from the train, looked in at the telegraph office and then went forward to the two giant locomotives, on whose sweating, monstrous backs the snow, suddenly visible in the haze of their lights, melted as it fell. He waited on the station platform while the second sleeper was cut out and the train made up again. Then, as they started, he swung aboard and in the brightly lighted men's compartment of the first Pullman checked up his report-sheets with a stub of pencil. They had stopped again, he noticed; now they were climbing a grade, more easily because of the decrease of weight; now a trestle rumbled under the wheels, telling him just where they were. Next was the powerful, steady push against opposition—the rotary was cutting its way through a drift.
Again they stopped—once more went on. Connery, having put his papers into his pocket, dozed, awoke, dozed again. The snow was certainly heavy, and the storm had piled it up across the cuts in great drifts which kept the rotary struggling almost constantly now. The progress of the train halted again and again; several times it backed, charged forward again—only to stop, back and charge again and then go on. But this did not disturb Connery. Then something went wrong. All at once he found himself, by a trainman's instinctive and automatic action, upon his feet; for the shock had been so slight as barely to be felt, far too slight certainly to have awakened any of the sleeping passengers in their berths. He went to the door of the car, lifted the platform stop, threw open the door of the vestibule and hanging by one hand to the rail, swung himself out from the side of the car to look ahead. He saw the forward one of the two locomotives wrapped in clouds of steam, and men arm-deep in snow wallowing forward to the rotary still further to the front, and the sight confirmed fully his apprehension that this halt was more important and likely to last much longer than those that had gone before.
It is the wonder of the moment of first awakening that one—however tried or troubled he may be when complete recollection returns—may find, at first, rehearsal of only what is pleasant in his mind. Eaton, waking and stretching himself luxuriously in his berth in the reverie halfway between sleep and full consciousness, found himself supremely happy. His feelings, before recollection came to check them, reminded him only that he had been made an acquaintance, almost a friend, the day before, by a wonderful, inspiring, beautiful girl. Then suddenly, into his clearing memory crushed and crowded the reason for his being where he was. By an instinctive jerk of his shoulders, almost a shudder, he drew the sheet and blanket closer about him; the smile was gone from his lips; he lay still, staring upward at the berth above his head and listening to the noises in the car.
The bell in the washroom at the end of the car was ringing violently, and some one was reinforcing his ring with a stentorian call for "Porter! Porter!"
Eaton realized that it was very cold in his berth—also that the train, which was standing still, had been in that motionless condition for some time. He threw up the window curtain as he appreciated that and, looking out, found that he faced a great unbroken bank of glistening white snow as high as the top of the car at this point and rising even higher ahead. He listened, therefore, while the Englishman—for the voice calling to the porter was his—extracted all available information from the negro.
"Porter!" Standish called again.
"Yessuh!"
"Close my window and be quick about it!"
"It's closed, suh."
"Closed?"
"Yessuh; I shut it en-durin' the night."
"Closed!" the voice behind the curtains iterated skeptically; there was a pause during which, probably, there was limited exploration. "I say, then, how cold is it outside?"
"Ten below this morning, suh."
"What, what? Where are we?"
"Between Fracroft and Simons, suh."
"Yet?"
"Yessuh, yit!"
"Hasn't your silly train moved since four o'clock?"
"Moved? No, suh. Not mo'n a yahd or two nohow, suh, and I reckon we backed them up again."
"That foolish snow still?"
"Yessuh; and snow some more, suh."
"But haven't we the plow still ahead?"
"Oh, yessuh; the plow's ahaid. We still got it; but that's all, suh. It ain't doin' much; it's busted."
"Eh—what?"
"Yessuh—busted! There was right smart of a slide across the track, and the crew, I understands, diagnosed it jus' fo' a snowbank and done bucked right into it. But they was rock in this, suh; we's layin' right below a hill; and that rock jus' busted that rotary like a Belgium shell hit it. Yessuh—pieces of that rotary essentially scattered themselves in four directions besides backwards and fo'wards. We ain't done much travelin' since then."
"Ah! But the restaurant car's still attached?"
"De restaur—oh, yessuh. We carries the diner through—from the Coast to Chicago."
"H'm! Ten below! Porter, is that wash-compartment hot? And are they serving breakfast yet?"
"Yessuh; yessuh!"
The Briton, from behind his curtains, continued; but Eaton no longer paid attention.
"Snowed in and stopped since four!" The realization startled him with the necessity of taking it into account in his plans. He jerked himself up in his berth and began pulling his clothes down from the hooks; then, as abruptly, he stopped dressing and sat absorbed in thought. Finally he parted the curtains and looked out into the aisle.
The Englishman, having elicited all he desired, or could draw, from the porter, now bulged through his curtains and stood in the aisle, unabashed, in gaudy pajamas and slippers, while he methodically bundled his clothes under his arm; then, still garbed only in pajamas, he paraded majestically to the washroom. The curtains over the berths at the other end of the car also bulged and emitted the two dark-haired girls. They were completely kimono-ed over any temporary deficiency of attire and skipped to the drawing-room inhabited by their parents. The drawing-room door instantly opened at Amy's knock, admitted the girls and shut again. Section Seven gave to the aisle the reddish-haired D. S. He carried coat, collar, hairbrushes and shaving case and went to join the Briton in the men's washroom.
There was now no one else in the main part of the car; and no berths other than those already accounted for had been made up. Yet Eaton still delayed; his first impulse to get up and dress had been lost in the intensity of the thought in which he was engaged. He had let himself sink back against the pillows, while he stared, unseeingly, at the solid bank of snow beside the car, when the door at the further end of the coach opened and Conductor Connery entered, calling a name. "Mr. Hillward! Mr. Lawrence Hillward! Telegram for Mr. Hillward!"
Eaton started at the first call of the name; he sat up and faced about.
"Mr. Hillward! Telegram for Mr. Lawrence Hillward!"
The conductor was opposite Section Three; Eaton now waited tensely and delayed until the conductor was past; then putting his head out of his curtains and assuring himself that the car was otherwise empty as when he had seen it last, he hailed as the conductor was going through the door.
"What name? Who is that telegram for?"
"Mr. Lawrence Hillward."
"Oh, thank you; then that's mine." He put his hand out between the curtains to take the yellow envelope.
Connery held back. "I thought your name was Eaton."
"It is. Mr. Hillward—Lawrence Hillward—is an associate of mine who expected to make this trip with me but could not. So I should have telegrams or other communications addressed to him. Is there anything to sign?"
"No, sir—train delivery. It's not necessary."
Eaton drew his curtains close again and ripped the envelope open; but before reading the message, he observed with alarm that his pajama jacket had opened across the chest, and a small round scar, such as that left by a high-powered bullet penetrating, was exposed. He gasped almost audibly, realizing this, and clapped his hand to his chest and buttoned his jacket. The message—nine words without signature—lay before him:
Thicket knot youngster omniscient issue foliage lecture tragic instigation.
It was some code which Eaton recognized but could not decipher at once. It was of concern, but at that instant, less of concern than to know whether his jacket had been open and his chest exposed when he took the message. The conductor was still standing in the aisle.
"When did you get this?" Eaton asked, looking out.
"Just now."
"How could you get it here?" Eaton questioned, watching the conductor's face.
"We've had train instruments—the emergency telegraph—on the wires since four o'clock and just got talking with the stations east; wires are still down to the west. That message came through yesterday some time and was waiting for you at Simons; when we got them this morning, they sent it on."
"I see; thanks." Eaton, assured that if the conductor had seen anything, he suspected no significance in what he saw, closed his curtains and buttoned them carefully. The conductor moved on. Eaton took a small English-Chinese pocket-dictionary from his vest pocket and opened it under cover of the blanket; counting five words up fromthickethe foundthey; five down fromknotgave himknow; six up fromyoungsterwasyou; six down fromomniscientwasone; seven up fromissuewasis; and so continuing, he translated the nine words to:
"They know you. One is following. Leave train instantly."
Eaton, nervous and jerky, as he completed the first six words, laughed as he compiled the final three. "Leave train instantly!" The humor of that advice in his present situation, as he looked out the window at the solid bank of snow, appealed to him. He slapped the little dictionary shut and returned it to his pocket. A waiter from the dining car came back, announcing the first call for breakfast, and spurred him into action. Passengers from the Pullman at the rear passed Eaton's section for the diner. He glanced out at the first two or three; then he heard Harriet Dorne's voice in some quiet, conventional remark to the man who followed her. Eaton started at it; then he dressed swiftly and hurried into the now deserted washroom and then on to breakfast.
The dining car, all gleaming crystal and silver and white covers within, also was surrounded by snow. The space outside the windows seemed somewhat wider than that about the sleeping car. And a moment before Eaton went forward, the last cloud had cleared and the sun had come out bright. The train was still quite motionless; the great drifts of snow, even with the tops of the cars on either side, made perfectly plain how hopeless it would be to try to proceed without the plow; and the heavy white frost which had not yet cleared from some of the window-panes, told graphically of the cold without. But the dining car was warm and cheerful, and it gave assurance that, if the train was helpless to move, it at least offered luxuries in its idleness. As Eaton stepped inside the door, the car seemed all cheer and good spirits.
Fresh red carnations and ruddy roses were, as usual, in the cut-glass vases on the white cloths; the waiters bore steaming pots of coffee and bowls of hot cereals to the different tables. These, as usual, were ten in number—five with places for four persons each, on one side of the aisle, and five, each with places for two persons, beside the windows on the other side of the car.
Harriet Dorne was sitting facing the door at the second of the larger tables; opposite her, and with his back to Eaton, sat Donald Avery. A third place was laid beside the girl, as though they expected Dorne to join them; but they had begun their fruit without waiting. The girl glanced up as Eaton halted in the doorway; her blue eyes brightened with a look part friendliness, part purpose. She smiled and nodded, and Avery turned about.
"Good morning, Mr. Eaton," the girl greeted.
"Good morning, Miss Dorne," Eaton replied collectedly. He nodded also to Avery, who, stiffly returning the nod, turned back again to Miss Dorne.
Amy and Constance, with their parents, occupied the third large table; the other three large tables were empty. "D. S." was alone at the furthest of the small tables; a traveling-salesman-looking person was washing down creamed Finnan haddock with coffee at the next; the passenger who had been alone in the second car was at the third; the Englishman, Standish, was beginning his iced grape-fruit at the table opposite Miss Dorne; and at the place nearest the door, an insignificant broad-shouldered and untidy young man, who had boarded the train at Spokane, had just spilled half a cup of coffee over the egg spots on his lapels as his unsteady and nicotine-stained fingers all but dropped the cup.
The dining car conductor, in accordance with the general determination to reserve the larger tables for parties traveling together, pulled back the chair opposite the untidy man; but Eaton, with a sharp sense of disgust, went past to the chair opposite the Englishman.
As he was about to seat himself there, the girl again looked up. "Oh, Mr. Eaton," she smiled, "wouldn't you like to sit with us? I don't think Father is coming to breakfast now; and if he does, of course there's still room."
She pulled back the chair beside her enticingly; and Eaton accepted it.
"Good morning, Mr. Avery," he said to Miss Dorne's companion formally as he sat down, and the man across the table murmured something perforce.
As Eaton ordered his breakfast, he appreciated for the first time that his coming had interrupted a conversation—or rather a sort of monologue of complaint on the part of Standish addressed impersonally to Avery.
"Extraordinarily exposed in these sleeping cars of yours, isn't one, wouldn't you say?" the Englishman appealed across the aisle.
"Exposed?" Avery repeated, more inclined to encourage the conversation.
"I say, is it quite the custom for a train servant—whenever he fancies he should—to reach across one, sleeping?"
"He means the porter closed his window during the night," Eaton explained to Avery.
"Quite so; and I knew nothing about it—nothing at all. Fancy! There was I in the bunk, and the beggar comes along, pulls my curtains aside, reaches across me—"
"It got very cold in the night," Avery offered.
"I know; but is that any reason for the beggar invading my bunk that way? He might have done anything to me! Any one in the car might have done anything to me! Any one in your bally corridor-train might have done anything. There was I, asleep—quite unconscious; people passing up and down the aisle just the other side of a foolish fall of curtain! How does any one know one of those people might not be an enemy of mine? Remarkable people, you Americans—inconsistent, I say. Lock your homes with most complicated fastenings—greatest lock-makers in the world—burglar alarms on windows; but when you travel, expose yourselves as one wouldn't dream of exposing oneself elsewhere. Amazing places, your Pullman coaches! Why, any one might do anything to any one! What's to stop him, what?"
Eaton, suddenly reminded of his telegram, put a hand into his pocket and fingered the torn scraps; he had meant to remove and destroy them, but had forgotten. He glanced at Harriet Dorne.
"What he says is quite true," she observed. She was smiling, however, as most of the other passengers were, at the Englishman's vehemence.
They engaged in conversation as they breakfasted—a conversation in which Avery took almost no part, though Miss Dorne tried openly to draw him in; then the sudden entrance of Connery, followed closely by a stout, brusque man who belonged to the rear Pullman, took Eaton's attention and hers.
Other passengers also looked up; and the nervous, untidy young man at the table near the door again slopped coffee over himself as the conductor gazed about.
"Which is him?" the man with Connery demanded loudly.
Connery checked him, but pointed at the same time to Eaton.
"That's him, is it?" the other man said. "Then go ahead."
Eaton observed that Avery, who had turned in his seat, was watching this diversion on the part of the conductor with interest. Connery stopped beside Eaton's seat.
"You took a telegram for Lawrence Hillward this morning," he asserted.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because it was mine, or meant for me, as I said at the time. My name is Eaton; but Mr. Hillward expected to make this trip with me."
The stout man with the conductor forced himself forward.
"That's pretty good, but not quite good enough!" he charged. "Conductor, get that telegram for me!"
Eaton got up, controlling himself under the insult of the other's manner.
"What business is it of yours?" he demanded.
"What business? Why, only that I'm Lawrence Hillward—that's all, my friend! What are you up to, anyway? Lawrence Hillward traveling with you! I never set eyes on you until I saw you on this train; and you take my telegram!" The charge was made loudly and distinctly; every one in the dining car—Eaton could not see every one, but he knew it was so—had put down fork or cup or spoon and was staring at him. "What did you do it for? What did you want with it?" the stout man blared on. "Did you think I wasn't on the train? What?
"I was in the washroom," he continued, roaring for the benefit of the car, "when the conductor went by with it. I couldn't take the telegram then—so I waited for the conductor to come back. When I got dressed, I found him, and he said you'd claimed my message. Say, hand it over now! What were you up to? What did you do that for?"
Eaton felt he was paling as he faced the blustering smaller man. He realized that the passengers he could see—those at the smaller tables—already had judged his explanation and found him wanting; the others unquestionably had done the same. Avery was gazing up at him with a sort of contented triumph.
"The telegram was for me, Conductor," he repeated.
"Get that telegram, Conductor!" the stout man demanded again.
"I suppose," Connery suggested, "you have letters or a card or something, Mr. Eaton, to show your relationship to Lawrence Hillward."
"No; I have not."
The man asserting himself as Hillward grunted.
"Have you anything to show you are Lawrence Hillward?" Eaton demanded of him.
"Did you tell any one on the train that your name was Hillward before you wanted this telegram?"
It was Harriet Dorne's voice which interposed; and Eaton felt his pulse leap as she spoke for him.
"I never gave any other name than Lawrence Hillward," the other declared.
Connery gazed from one claimant to the other. "Will you give this gentleman the telegram?" he asked Eaton.
"I will not."
"Then I shall furnish him another copy; it was received here on the train by our express-clerk as the operator. I'll go forward and get him another copy."
"That's for you to decide," Eaton said; and as though the matter was closed for him, he resumed his seat. He was aware that, throughout the car, the passengers were watching him curiously; he would have foregone the receipt of the telegram rather than that attention should be attracted to him in this way. Avery was still gazing at him with that look of quiet satisfaction; Eaton had not dared, as yet, to look at Harriet Dorne. When, constraining himself to a manner of indifference, he finally looked her way, she began to chat with him as lightly as before. Whatever effect the incident just closed had had upon the others, it appeared to have had none at all upon her.
"Are you ready to go back to our car now, Harriet?" Avery inquired when she had finished her breakfast, though Eaton was not yet through.
"Surely there's no hurry about anything to-day," the girl returned. They waited until Eaton had finished.
"Shall we all go back to the observation car and see if there's a walk down the track or whether it's snowed over?" she said impartially to the two. They went through the Pullmans together.
The first Pullman contained four or five passengers; the next, in which Eaton had his berth, was still empty as they passed through. The porter had made up all the berths, and only luggage and newspapers and overcoats occupied the seats. The next Pullman also, at first glance, seemed to have been deserted in favor of the diner forward or of the club-car further back. The porter had made up all the berths there also, except one; but some one still was sleeping behind the curtains of Section Three, for a man's hand hung over the aisle. It was a gentleman's hand, with long, well-formed fingers, sensitive and at the same time strong. That was the berth of Harriet Dorne's father; Eaton gazed down at the hand as he approached the section, and then he looked up quickly to the girl. She had observed the hand, as also had Avery; but, plainly, neither of them noticed anything strange either in its posture or appearance. Their only care had been to avoid brushing against it on their way down the aisle so as not to disturb the man behind the curtain; but Eaton, as he saw the hand, started.
He was the last of the three to pass, and so the others did not notice his start; but so strong was the fascination of the hand in the aisle that he turned back and gazed at it before going on into the last car. Some eight or ten passengers—men and women—were lounging in the easy-chairs of the observation-room; a couple, ulstered and fur-capped, were standing on the platform gazing back from the train.
The sun was still shining, and the snow had stopped some hours before; but the wind which had brought the storm was still blowing, and evidently it had blown a blizzard after the train stopped at four that morning. The canyon through the snowdrifts, bored by the giant rotary plow the night before, was almost filled; drifts of snow eight or ten feet high and, in places, pointing still higher, came up to the rear of the train; the end of the platform itself was buried under three feet of snow; the men standing on the platform could barely look over the higher drifts.
"There's no way from the train in that direction now," Harriet Dorne lamented as she saw this.
"There was no way five minutes after we stopped," one of the men standing at the end of the car volunteered. "From Fracroft on—I was the only passenger in sleeper Number Two, and they'd told me to get up; they gave me a berth in another car and cut my sleeper out at Fracroft—we were bucking the drifts about four miles an hour; it seemed to fill in behind about as fast and as thick as we were cutting it out in front. It all drifted in behind as soon as we stopped, the conductor tells me."
The girl made polite acknowledgment and referred to her two companions.
"What shall we do with ourselves, then?"
"Cribbage, Harriet? You and I?" Avery invited.