A VOICE IN THE NIGHT.
A ROUGH voice aroused Olive. She sprang up in terror and stood pressed close against the piled up freight in the car. It was an odd-looking figure she made, as though she had stepped out of a world several hundred years younger than the present one. The coarse man who watched her dimly felt it.
The girl's shoes were ragged and hardly covered her slender feet, her skirt was torn and old. Over her shoulders hung a strange fur garment, shapeless, save that a hole had been cut in the center for her head. Her beautiful black hair was braided and one long plait hung over each shoulder; her head was uncovered and her delicate face, with its pointed chin, was deathly pale. She was trembling. Dark shadows encircled her great black eyes and there was a look not of defiance but of pleading in them.
So picturesque a passenger had never before stolen a ride on a modern freight train. She belonged to the days of the pioneer settlers in the new land of America.
"How did you come here?" the man demanded gruffly.
Olive's voice shook. She had thought it would be easy to tell her story, if she could only get away from the Indians, but this fierce man frightened her more than any one of them could have done. What must she say? Where could she begin with the tale of her misfortunes.
"I stole in, when the train stopped a while ago, I don't just know when," Olive answered vaguely. She could not tell how long she had been asleep.
"Then you'll git out the next time it stops, young Missie," the trainman announced harshly. "I'd put you off right now, but we are already behind time, because of a rascally Indian boy a piece up the road. Better stay hid and not let our engineer catch sight of you, or he'd make it good and hot for you. Maybe he would turn you over to the police."
Olive could not realize it, but her appearance had already touched her discoverer. She crouched in her corner again and bowed her head in her slim brown hands, as she had the day when the ranch girls brought her out of Frieda's cave. She did not try to defend herself.
The trainman climbed up on a box and sat whittling a stick and watching Olive out of a pair of shrewd Irish blue eyes. He was not a fierce man. He had a wife and five tow-headed children, living in one of the little frame shacks along the line of the railroad. The man was clever enough to see that Olive was not an ordinary thief or impostor.