He looked out the window. A sign-board on the tiny frame building beyond the equally diminutive platform told him it was Moose Horn Station.
A stateroom door opened somewhere and he heard a passenger hurry along the aisle, out of the coach and down the train steps. Next instant he saw Norman T. Gildersleeve, the man he had just been talking to, appear on the station platform, wearing a light overcoat and carrying a small black bag. Gildersleeve looked swiftly about the area where the dull station lamp-light and the glow from the car windows fell, then hurried around the side of the station building and disappeared in the shadows.
He had barely gone when another form seemed to rise out of the shadows near the train somewhere, a tall, graceful figure of a woman in sable furs and wearing a large picture hat. As if Hammond’s stare had attracted her, she turned and glanced for a fleeting instant at the car window. Hers was a savage, dark beauty with eyes so intense they glowed like luminous discs of blackness in the shadowy light.
The woman went rapidly to the station, passed in the door, remained a moment, re-appeared and returned down the platform to the train.
Hammond strode out to the vestibuled platform of the coach. He watched the station area closely for Norman T. Gildersleeve’s return. But Gildersleeve did not come back.
The engine’s bell sounded.
Hammond thought of his berth, but some movement within drew his gaze through the glass door of the compartment coach. The door of Gildersleeve’s stateroom was open, and the little grey man, Eulas Daly, passed in, closing the door behind him. Hammond was sure Gildersleeve was not with him and that he could not have preceded him.
The young man was about to leave when a silent form emerged from the shadow near the coach door. It was the wonderful girl he had seen in the drawing-room, but there was great perplexity in her face now. The train was rapidly accumulating the even roar of its maximum speed.
The girl looked back and her eyes met Hammond’s beyond the glass of the platform door. Her hand went to her lips as though to stifle a cry that trembled there. The fright registered upon her face went to him like the stab of a knife. Plainly, he was the cause of that fright. Mystified, and somehow deeply hurt, he drew back into the shadows and she fled like one fearing for her life.
With confusion still upon him, Hammond hurried to his berth in the pullman.