"I—I'm afraid nothing I could say would have much effect on them, knowing as little about—about you as I do!"
They dashed the door open then—silenced and overwhelmed him; and they took her from the room and left him alone again. But there was something left with him which they could not take away; for in the moment he had stood alone with her and passionately pleading, something had passed between them—he could give no name to it, but he knew that Harriet Santoine never could think of him again without a stirring of her pulses which drew her toward him. And through the rest of the lonely day and through the sleepless night, he treasured this and thought of it again and again.
The following morning the relieving snowplows arrived from the east, and Eaton felt it was the beginning of the end for him. He watched from his window men struggling in the snow about the forward end of the train; then the train moved forward past the shoveled and trampled snow where rock and pieces of the snowplow were piled beside the track—stopped, waited; finally it went on again and began to take up its steady progress.
The attack upon Santoine having taken place in Montana, Eaton thought that he would be turned over to the police somewhere within that State, and he expected it would be done at the first stop; but when the train slowed at Simons, he saw the town was nothing more than a little hamlet beside a side-track. They surely could not deliver him to the village authorities here. The observation car and the Santoine car were uncoupled here and the train made up again with the Santoine car as the last car of the train and the observation car ahead of it. This, evidently, was to stop the passing of passengers through the Santoine car. Did it mean that the change in Santoine's condition which Dr. Sinclair had been expecting had taken place and was for the worse? Eaton would have liked to ask about this of Connery, whom he saw standing outside his window and keeping watch upon him during the switching of the cars; but he knew that the conductor would not answer him.
He rang, instead, for the porter and asked him for a railway folder, and when this had been brought, he opened it to the map of the railroad and checked off the names of the towns they would pass through. Nearly all the names set in the bold-face letters which denoted the cities and larger towns ahead of them were, he found, toward the eastern end of the State; the nearest—and the one, therefore, at which he thought he would be given up—was several hours away. At long intervals the train passed villages all but buried in the snow; the inhabitants of these, gathered at the stations, stared in on him as they looked in on any other passenger; and at each of these stops Connery stood outside his window guarding against possibility of his escape. Each time, too, that the train slowed, the porter unlocked the door of the compartment, opened it and stood waiting until the train had regained its speed; plainly they were taking no chances of his dropping from the window.
Early in the afternoon, as they approached the town whose name in bold-face had made him sure that it was the one where he would be given to the police, Eaton rang for the porter again.
"Will you get me paper and an envelope?" he asked.
The negro summoned the conductor.
"You want to write?" Connery asked.
"Yes."