Tom burst out with a grateful ejaculation, but the conductor winked at him, and then turned and looked rigidly in the other direction. The boy rushed down the track alongside the train, found the open door of the box-car, and swung himself into it. He sat down on the floor in a corner, and almost instantly lapsed into a sort of stupor of weariness, from which he was roused by the violent shock and crash of the train’s getting under way. He saw the station slide past the open door; the endless line of spruce trunks succeeded it. The train gathered speed; he was really started for the city at last.
It was not a comfortable ride. The freight-cars jolted and pitched, crashing together with shattering jolts as the train slackened or increased speed. Despite this, however, Tom dozed during a good deal of the forty miles to Bala, arousing fully only at the occasional halts. No one came near him, and nobody appeared to see him when he slipped out of his box-car at the Junction, and made haste to buy his ticket for Toronto on the express.
The express was late, and he filled in the time by endeavoring to brush and clean himself a little, with imperfect success. He obtained something to eat at the lunch-counter, and paced up and down the platform counting the minutes. The express arrived at last, and he was the only passenger to get aboard. He longed to take a sleeper berth, but he was so disreputable-looking that he dared not attempt it. He feared even to enter the first-class coaches, and dropped into a seat in the smoker.
The hard part of the journey was over. Everything depended now on the train, and he resigned himself to chance, with a dull fatalism. He had done all he could, and he was too deadly weary to speculate any more upon his chances of winning. He slept through most of the journey, and came out, dazed and confused, upon the platform of the Union Station, to see the big illuminated face of the clock indicating eight.
It stung him again to desperate anxiety. He hastened to a telephone booth in the waiting-room and called Mr. Armstrong’s office. Central was unable to get any answer. The office must be closed. He then rang up the lawyer’s house. A woman’s voice answered.
“Mr. Armstrong is downtown, attending a business meeting at the King Edward Hotel. Is there any message?”
Tom dropped the receiver into the hook. He knew well what that business meeting was. They were holding it at the King Edward, then. Luckily, the hotel was not far from the depot, and a direct street-car line carried him there in five minutes.
The throng of well-dressed people about the door of the big hotel stared at the grimed, smoky, ragged young man who burst in, and the outraged door-porter made an ineffectual grab to stop him. Few such disreputable figures had ever passed that portal. Tom cast a rapid glance around the leather chairs of the marble lobby, failed to spy the face he sought, and hurried up to the desk.
“Mr. Henry Armstrong—the lawyer—is he here?”
“Haven’t seen him,” returned the clerk, eyeing Tom with indignation, and he beckoned privately to a porter, indicating that the young man should be removed.