“‘Nate,’ he said, ‘go back and close your switch.’ Then he jumped off, and the door closed. For a moment I forgot but that George was living. I rubbed my eyes to see if I was awake. I went to the end of the car, and looked out, but no one was in sight. There were four drovers in the car playing cards and laughing. While I was looking at them and wondering what it all meant, the door flew open again and George Marvin once more appeared. ‘Nate,’ he said, very slowly and expressively, ‘go back and close your switch.’ I asked the drovers if they saw any one. They said, ‘Yes, a fellow told you to close your switch.’ ‘That man has been dead two weeks,’ I said.
“They urged me to go back and see what it meant, and as the train had stopped, I ran back and found a piece of coal had fallen between the rails and prevented the switch—which worked automatically—from closing. I got it out and closed the switch just as the express came in sight. Otherwise it would have run into us, and another railroad horror would have been recorded. Now how do you account for that?�
“Had it not been for the drovers seeing the vision I should think you might have seen, standing in the rear of the car, that the switch did not close; but as you were carrying on another train of thought, perhaps thinking of your friend, you were not conscious of noticing it; and that the other part of your mind warned you. Your imagination supplied the vision.�
“But the drovers?�
“Well, perhaps it was thought transference. You received the impression passively, scarcely realizing it. The passive mind might have transferred it to their minds. I must confess there is much we cannot understand even in the laws that govern mental telepathy.�
CHAPTER XXII
NEW ARRIVALS
The soft and balsam-scented air of summer fluttered the white curtains of Alice Cramer’s house as she sat before the open doorway awaiting, with no little anxiety, the arrival of her fashionable sister-in-law from San Francisco.
And when her practised eye saw the carriage, a mere speck against the sky, coming across the prairie, her heart throbbed with the dread of meeting and she looked about her mean little apartments with a sense of embarrassment. What had come over her, that she should have lost the self-possession and ease of manner inherent in her, and become timid and awkward as the most illiterate of her neighbors?
“I have been so long out of the world I am no longer myself,� she murmured, “and yet—and yet it is not wholly that. I seem to be living in a state of chronic fear. If only her coming will free me from those other visitors.�
With a choking sensation in her throat, and trembling in her limbs, she arose as the carriage turned from the highway toward the house. She took in with a glance the blonde-haired, blue-eyed sister, the curled, elaborately-dressed child, and then her eyes rested upon the most beautiful face she had ever seen, it seemed to her. A face so commanding and bright, so impellingly attractive, she gazed at it in joyous wonder.