"Until I come to you as—as you have never known me yet!"

THE BLIND MAN'S EYES

By WILLIAM MACHARG & EDWIN BALMER

With Frontispiece
By WILSON C. DEXTER

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers —— New York

Published by Arrangements with LITTLE, BROWN & COMPANY

Copyright, 1916,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
All rights reserved

To
R. G.

CONTENTS

THE BLIND MAN'S EYES

CHAPTER I

A FINANCIER DIES

Gabriel Warden—capitalist, railroad director, owner of mines and timber lands, at twenty a cow-puncher, at forty-eight one of the predominant men of the Northwest Coast—paced with quick, uneven steps the great wicker-furnished living room of his home just above Seattle on Puget Sound. Twice within ten minutes he had used the telephone in the hall to ask the same question and, apparently to receive the same reply—that the train from Vancouver, for which he had inquired, had come in and that the passengers had left the station.

It was not like Gabriel Warden to show nervousness of any sort; Kondo, the Japanese doorman, who therefore had found something strange in this telephoning, watched him through the portières which shut off the living-room from the hall. Three times Kondo saw him—big, uncouth in the careless fit of his clothes, powerful and impressive in his strength of feature and the carriage of his well-shaped head—go to the window and, watch in hand, stand staring out. It was a Sunday evening toward the end of February—cold, cloudy and with a chill wind driving over the city and across the Sound. Warden evidently saw no one as he gazed out into the murk; but each moment, Kondo observed, his nervousness increased. He turned suddenly and pressed the bell to call a servant. Kondo, retreating silently down the hall, advanced again and entered the room; he noticed then that Warden's hand, which was still holding the watch before him, was shaking.

"A young man who may, or may not, give a name, will ask for me in a few moments. He will say he called by appointment. Take him at once to my smoking-room, and I will see him there. I am going to Mrs. Warden's room now."

He went up the stairs, Kondo noticed, still absently holding his watch in his hand.

Warden controlled his nervousness before entering his wife's room,—where she had just finished dressing to go out,—so that she did not at first sense anything unusual. In fact, she talked with him casually for a moment or so before she even sent away her maid. He had promised a few days before to accompany her to a concert; she thought he had come simply to beg off. When they were alone, she suddenly saw that he had come to her to discuss some serious subject.

"Cora," he said, when he had closed the door after the maid, "I want your advice on a business question."

"A business question!" She was greatly surprised. She was a number of years younger than he; he was one of those men who believe all business matters should be kept from their wives.

"I mean it came to me through some business—discoveries."

"And you cannot decide it for yourself?"

"I had decided it." He looked again at his watch. "I had quite decided it; but now—It may lead to some result which I have suddenly felt that I haven't the right to decide entirely for myself."

Warden's wife for the first time felt alarmed. She could not well describe his manner; it did not suggest fear for himself; she could not imagine his feeling such fear; but she was frightened. She put her hand on his arm.

"You mean it affects me directly?"

"It may. For that reason I feel I must do what you would have me do."

He seized both her hands in his and held her before him; she waited for him to go on.

"Cora," he said, "what would you have me do if you knew I had found out that a young man—a man who, four or five years ago, had as much to live for as any man might—had been outraged in every right by men who are my friends? Would you have me fight the outfit for him? Or would you have me—lie down?"

His fingers almost crushed hers in his excitement. She stared at him with only pride then; she was proud of his strength, of his ability to fight, of the power she knew he possessed to force his way against opposition. "Why, you would fight them!"

"You mean you want me to?"

"Isn't that what you had decided to do?"

He only repeated. "You want me to fight them?"

"Of course."

"No matter what it costs?"

She realized then that what he was facing was very grave.

"Cora," he said, "I didn't come to ask your advice without putting this squarely to you. If I go into this fight, I shall be not only an opponent to some of my present friends; I shall be a threat to them—something they may think it necessary to remove."

"Remove?"

"Such things have happened—to better men than I, over smaller matters."

She cried out. "You mean some one might kill you?"

"Should that keep me from going in?"

She hesitated. He went on: "Would you have me afraid to do a thing that ought to be done, Cora?"

"No," she said; "I would not."

"All right, then. That's all I had to know now. The young man is coming to see me to-night, Cora. Probably he's downstairs. I'll tell you all I can after I've talked with him."

Warden's wife tried to hold him a moment more, but he loosed himself from her and left her.

He went directly downstairs; as he passed through the hall, the telephone bell rang. Warden himself answered it. Kondo, who from his place in the hall overheard Warden's end of the conversation, made out only that the person at the other end of the line appeared to be a friend, or at least an acquaintance, of Warden's. Kondo judged this from the tone of the conversation; Warden spoke no names. Apparently the other person wished to see Warden at once. Warden finished, "All right; I'll come and get you. Wait for me there." Then he hung up.

Turning to Kondo, he ordered his limousine car. Kondo transmitted the order and brought Warden's coat and cap; then Kondo opened the house door for him and the door of the limousine, which had been brought under the porte-cochère. Kondo heard Warden direct the chauffeur to a drug store near the center of the city; the chauffeur was Patrick Corboy, a young Irishman who had been in Warden's employ for more than five years; his faithfulness to Warden was never questioned. Corboy drove to the place Warden had directed. As they stopped, a young man of less than medium height, broad-shouldered and wearing a mackintosh, came to the curb and spoke to Warden. Corboy did not hear the name, but Warden immediately asked the man into the car; he directed Corboy to return home. The chauffeur did this, but was obliged on the way to come to a complete stop several times, as he met streetcars or other vehicles on intersecting streets.

Almost immediately after Warden had left the house, the door-bell rang and Kondo answered it. A young man with a quiet and pleasant bearing inquired for Mr. Warden and said he came by appointment. Kondo ushered him into the smoking room, where the stranger waited. The Jap did not announce this arrival to any one, for he had already received his instructions; but several times in the next half hour he looked in upon him. The stranger was always sitting where he had seated himself when Kondo showed him in; he was merely waiting. In about forty minutes, Corboy drove the car under the porte-cochère again and got down and opened the door. Kondo had not heard the car at once, and the chauffeur had not waited for him. There was no motion inside the limousine. The chauffeur looked in and saw Mr. Warden lying back quietly against the cushions in the back of the seat; he was alone.

Corboy noticed then that the curtains all about had been pulled down; he touched the button and turned on the light at the top of the car, and then he saw that Warden was dead; his cap was off, and the top of his head had been smashed in by a heavy blow.

The chauffeur drew back, gasping; Kondo, behind him on the steps, cried out and ran into the house calling for help. Two other servants and Mrs. Warden, who had remained nervously in her room, ran down. The stranger who had been waiting, now seen for the first time by Mrs. Warden, came out from the smoking room to help them. He aided in taking the body from the car and helped to carry it into the living room and lay it on a couch; he remained until it was certain that Warden had been killed and nothing could be done. When this had been established and further confirmed by the doctor who was called, Kondo and Mrs. Warden looked around for the young man—but he was no longer there.

The news of the murder brought extras out upon the streets of Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland at ten o'clock that night; the news took the first page in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York papers, in competition with the war news, the next morning. Seattle, stirred at once at the murder of one of its most prominent citizens, stirred still further at the new proof that Warden had been a power in business and finance; then, as the second day's dispatches from the larger cities came in, it stirred a third time at the realization—for so men said—that this was the second time such a murder had happened.

Warden had been what was called among men of business and finance a member of the "Latron crowd"; he had been close, at one time, to the great Western capitalist Matthew Latron; the properties in which he had made his wealth, and whose direction and administration had brought him the respect and attention of other men, had been closely allied with or even included among those known as the "Latron properties"; and Latron, five years before, had been murdered. The parallel between the two cases was not as great as the newspapers in their search for the startling made it appear; nevertheless, there was a parallel. Latron's murderer had been a man who called upon him by appointment, and Warden's murderer, it appeared, had been equally known to him, or at least equally recommended. Of this as much was made as possible in the suggestion that the same agency was behind the two.

The statement of Cora Warden, indicating that Warden's death might have been caused by men with whom he was—or had been at one time—associated, was compared with the fact that Latron's death had occurred at a time of fierce financial stress and warfare. But in this comparison Warden's statement to his wife was not borne out. Men of high place in the business world appeared, from time to time during the next few days, at Warden's offices and even at his house, coming from other cities on the Coast and from as far east as Chicago; they felt the need, many of them, of looking after interests of their own which were involved with Warden's. All concurred in saying that, so far as Warden and his properties were concerned, the time was one of peace; neither attack nor serious disagreement had threatened him.

More direct investigation of the murder went on unceasingly through these days. The statements of Kondo and Corboy were verified; it was even learned at what spot Warden's murderer had left the motor unobserved by Corboy. Beyond this, no trace was found of him, and the disappearance of the young man who had come to Warden's house and waited there for three quarters of an hour to see him was also complete.

No suspicion attached to this young man; Warden's talk with his wife made it completely clear that, if he had any connection with the murder, it was only as befriending him brought danger to Warden. His disappearance seemed explicable therefore only in one way. Appeals to him to come forward were published in the newspapers; he was offered the help of influential men, if help was what he needed, and a money reward was promised for revealing himself and explaining why Warden saw inevitable danger in befriending him. To these offers he made no response. The theory therefore gained ground that his appointment with Warden had involved him in Warden's fate; it was generally credited that he too must have been killed; or, if he was alive, he saw in Warden's swift and summary destruction a warning of his own fate if he came forward and sought to speak at this time.

Thus after ten days no information from or about this mysterious young man had been gained.

CHAPTER II

THE EXPRESS IS HELD FOR A PERSONAGE

On the morning of the eleventh day, Bob Connery, special conductor for the Coast division of one of the chief transcontinentals, was having late breakfast on his day off at his little cottage on the shore of Puget Sound, when he was treated to the unusual sight of a large touring car stopping before his door. The car carried no one but the chauffeur, however, and he at once made it plain that he came only as a message-bearer when he hurried from the car to the house with an envelope in his hand. Connery, meeting him at the door, opened the envelope and found within an order in the handwriting of the president of the railroad and over his signature.

Connery:

No. 5 being held at Seattle terminal until nine o'clock—will run one hour late. This is your authority to supersede the regular man as conductor—prepared to go through to Chicago. You will facilitate every desire and obey, when possible, any request even as to running of the train, which may be made by a passenger who will identify himself by a card from me.

H. E. JARVIS.

The conductor, accustomed to take charge of trains when princes, envoys, presidents and great people of any sort took to travel publicly or privately, fingered the heavy cream-colored note-paper upon which the order was written and looked up at the chauffeur.

The order itself was surprising enough even to Connery. Some passenger of extraordinary influence, obviously, was to take the train; not only the holding of the transcontinental for an hour told this, but there was the further plain statement that the passenger would be incognito. Astonishing also was the fact that the order was written upon private note-paper. There had been a monogram at the top of the sheet, but it had been torn off; that would not have been if Mr. Jarvis had sent the order from home. Who could have had the president of the road call upon him at half past seven in the morning and have told Mr. Jarvis to hold the Express for an hour?

Connery, having served for twenty of his forty-two years under Mr. Jarvis, and the last five, at least, in almost a confidential capacity, was certain of the distinctive characters of the president's handwriting. The enigma of the order, however, had piqued him so that he pretended doubt.

"Where did you get this?" he challenged the chauffeur.

"From Mr. Jarvis."

"Of course; but where?"

"You mean you want to know where he was?"

Connery smiled quietly. If he himself was trusted to be cautious and circumspect, the chauffeur also plainly was accustomed to be in the employ of one who required reticence. Connery looked from the note to the bearer more keenly. There was something familiar in the chauffeur's face—just enough to have made Connery believe, at first, that probably he had seen the man meeting some passenger at the station.

"You are—" Connery ventured more casually.

"In private employ; yes, sir," the man cut off quickly. Then Connery knew him; it was when Gabriel Warden traveled on Connery's train that the conductor had seen this chauffeur; this was Patrick Corboy, who had driven Warden the night he was killed. But Connery, having won his point, knew better than to show it. "Waiting for a receipt from me?" he asked as if he had abandoned his curiosity.

The chauffeur nodded. Connery took a sheet of paper, wrote on it, sealed it in an envelope and handed it over; the chauffeur hastened back to his car and drove off. Connery, order in hand, stood at the door watching the car depart. He whistled softly to himself. Evidently his passenger was to be one of the great men in Eastern finance who had been brought West by Warden's death. As the car disappeared, Connery gazed off to the Sound.

The March morning was windy and wet, with a storm blowing in from the Pacific. East of the mountains—in Idaho and Montana—there was snow, and a heavy fall of it, as the conductor well knew from the long list of incoming trains yesterday stalled or badly overdue; but at Seattle, so far, only rain or a soft, sloppy sleet had appeared. Through this rose the smoke from tugs and a couple of freighters putting out in spite of the storm, and from further up Eliot Bay reverberated the roar of the steam-whistle of some large ship signaling its intention to pass another to the left. The incoming vessel loomed in sight and showed the graceful lines, the single funnel and the white- and red-barred flag of the Japanese line, the Nippon Yusen Kaisha. Connery saw that it was, as he anticipated, the Tamba Maru, due two days before, having been delayed by bad weather over the Pacific. It would dock, Connery estimated, just in time to permit a passenger to catch the Eastern Express if that were held till nine o'clock. So, as he hastened to the car-line, Connery smiled at himself for taking the trouble to make his earlier surmises. More probably the train was being held just for some party on the boat. Going to the chief dispatcher's office to confirm understanding of his orders, he found that Mr. Jarvis had sent simply the curt command, "Number Five will run one hour late." Connery went down to the trainsheds.

The Eastern Express, with its gleaming windows, shining brass and speckless, painted steel, was standing between the sooty, slush-splashed trains which had just struggled in from over the mountain; a dozen passengers, tired of waiting on the warm, cushioned seats of the Pullmans, sauntered up and down beside the cars, commenting on the track-conditions which, apparently, prevented even starting a train on time. Connery looked these over and then got aboard the train and went from observation to express car. Travel was light that trip; in addition to the few on the platform, Connery counted only fourteen passengers on the train. He scrutinized these without satisfaction; all appeared to have arrived at the train long before and to have been waiting. Connery got off and went back to the barrier.

Old Sammy Seaton, the gateman, stood in his iron coop twirling a punch about his finger. Old Sammy's scheme of sudden wealth—every one has a plan by which at any moment wealth may arrive—was to recognize and apprehend some wrongdoer, or some lost or kidnaped person for whom a great reward would be given. His position at the gate through which must pass most of the people arriving at the great Coast city, or wishing to depart from it, certainly was excellent; and by constant and careful reading of the papers, classifying and memorizing faces, he prepared himself to take advantage of any opportunity. Indeed, in his years at the gate, he had succeeded in no less than seven acknowledged cases in putting the police upon the track of persons "wanted"; these, however, happened to be worth only minor rewards. Sammy still awaited his great "strike."

"Any one off on Number Five, Sammy?" Connery questioned carelessly as he approached. Sammy's schemes involved the following of the comings and goings of the great as well as of the "wanted."

Old Sammy shook his head. "What're we holding for?" he whispered. "Ah—for them?"

A couple of station-boys, overloaded with hand-baggage, scurried in from the street; some one shouted for a trunk-truck, and baggagemen ran. A group of people, who evidently had come to the station in covered cars, crowded out to the gate and lined up to pass old Sammy. The gateman straightened importantly and scrutinized each person presenting a ticket. Much of the baggage carried by the boys, and also the trunks rushed by on the trucks, bore foreign hotel and steamship "stickers." Connery observed the label of the Miyaka Hotel, Kioto, leaving visible only the "Bombay" of another below it; others proclaimed "Amoy," "Tonkin," and "Shanghai." This baggage and some of the people, at least, undoubtedly had just landed from the Tamba Maru. Connery inspected with even greater attention the file at the gate and watched old Sammy also as each passed him.

The first of the five in line was a girl—a girl about twenty-two or three, Connery guessed. She was of slightly more than medium height, slender and erect in figure, and with slim, gloved hands. She had the easy, interested air of a person of assured position. She evidently had come to the station in a motor-car which had kept off the sleet, but had let in the wind—a touring-car, possibly, with top up. Her fair cheeks were ruddy and her blue eyes bright; her hair, which was deep brown and abundant, was caught back from her brow, giving her a more outdoor and boyish look. When Connery first saw her, she seemed to be accompanying the man who now was behind her; but she offered her own ticket for perusal at the gate, and as soon as she was through, she hurried on ahead alone.

Whether or not she had come from the Japanese boat, Connery could not tell; her ticket, at least, disclaimed for her any connection with the foreign baggage-labels, for it was merely the ordinary form calling for transportation from Seattle to Chicago. Connery was certain he did not know her. He noticed that old Sammy had held her at the gate as long as possible, as if hoping to recollect who she might be; but now that she was gone, the gateman gave his attention more closely to the first man—a tall, strongly built man, neither heavy nor light, and with a powerful patrician face. His hair and his mustache, which was clipped short and did not conceal his good mouth, were dark; his brows were black and distinct, but not bushy or unpleasantly thick; his eyes were hidden by smoked glasses such as one wears against a glare of snow.

"Chicago?" old Sammy questioned. Connery knew that it was to draw the voice in reply; but the man barely nodded, took back his ticket—which also was the ordinary form of transportation from Seattle to Chicago—and strode on to the train. Connery found his gaze following this man; the conductor did not know him, nor had old Sammy recognized him; but both were trying to place him. He, unquestionably, was a man to be known, though not more so than many who traveled in the transcontinental trains.

A trim, self-assured man of thirty—his open overcoat showed a cutaway underneath—came past next, proffering the plain Seattle-Chicago ticket.

An Englishman, with red-veined cheeks, fumbling, clumsy fingers and curious, interested eyes, immediately followed. To him, plainly, the majority of the baggage on the trucks belonged; he had "booked" the train at Hong Kong and seemed pleasantly surprised that his tourist ticket was instantly accepted. The name upon the strip, "Henry Standish," corresponded with the "H. S., Nottingham," emblazoned on the luggage.

The remaining man, carrying his own grips, which were not initialed, set them down in the gate and felt in his pocket for his transportation.

This fifth person had appeared suddenly after the line of four had formed in front of old Sammy at the gate; he had taken his place with them only after scrutiny of them and of the station all around. Like the Englishman's, his ticket was a strip which originally had held coupons for the Pacific voyage and some indefinite journey in Asia before; unlike the Englishman's,—and his baggage did not bear the pasters of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha,—the ticket was close to the date when it would have expired. It bore upon the line where the purchaser signed, the name "Philip D. Eaton" in plain, vigorous characters without shading or flourish. An American, and too young to have gained distinction in any of the ordinary ways by which men lift themselves above others, he still made a profound impression upon Connery. There was something about him which said, somehow, that these strips of transportation were taking him home after a long and troublesome absence. He combined, in some strange way, exaltation with weariness. He was, plainly, carefully observant of all that went on about him, even these commonplace formalities connected with taking the train; and Connery felt that it was by premeditation that he was the last to pass the gate.

As a sudden eddy of the gale about the shed blew the ticket from old Sammy's cold fingers, the young man stooped to recover it. The wind blew off his cloth cap as he did so, and as he bent and straightened before old Sammy, the old man suddenly gasped; and while the traveler pulled on his cap, recovered his ticket and hurried down the platform to the train, the gateman stood staring after him as though trying to recall who the man presenting himself as Philip D. Eaton was.

Connery stepped beside the old man.

"Who is it, Sammy?" he demanded.

"Who?" Sammy repeated. His eyes were still fixed on the retreating figure. "Who? I don't know."

The gateman mumbled, repeating to himself the names of the famous, the great, the notorious, in his effort to fit one to the man who had just passed. Connery awaited the result, his gaze following Eaton until he disappeared aboard the train. No one else belated and bound for the Eastern Express was in sight. The president's order to the conductor and to the dispatcher simply had directed that Number Five would run one hour late; it must leave in five minutes; and Connery, guided by the impression the man last through the gate had made upon him and old Sammy both, had no doubt that the man for whom the train had been held was now on board.

For a last time, the conductor scrutinized old Sammy. The gateman's mumblings were clearly fruitless; if Eaton were not the man's real name, old Sammy was unable to find any other which fitted. As Connery watched, old Sammy gave it up. Connery went out to the train. The passengers who had been parading the platform had got aboard; the last five to arrive also had disappeared into the Pullmans, and their luggage had been thrown into the baggage car. Connery jumped aboard. He turned back into the observation car and then went forward into the next Pullman. In the aisle of this car the five whom Connery had just watched pass the gate were gathered about the Pullman conductor, claiming their reservations. Connery looked first at Eaton, who stood beside his grips a little apart, but within hearing of the rest; and then, passing him, he joined the Pullman conductor.

The three who had passed the gate first—the girl, the man with the glasses and the young man in the cutaway—it had now become clear were one party. They had had reservations made, apparently, in the name of Dorne; and these reservations were for a compartment and two sections in this car, the last of the four Pullmans. As they discussed the disposition of these, the girl's address to the spectacled man made plain that he was her father; her name, apparently, was Harriet; the young man in the cutaway coat was "Don" to her and "Avery" to her father. His relation, while intimate enough to permit him to address the girl as "Harry," was unfailingly respectful to Mr. Dorne; and against them both Dorne won his way; his daughter was to occupy the drawing-room; he and Avery were to have sections in the open car.

"You have Sections One and Three, sir," the Pullman conductor told him. And Dorne directed the porter to put Avery's luggage in Section One, his own in Section Three.

The Englishman who had come by the Japanese steamer was unsupplied with a sleeping-car ticket; he accepted, after what seemed only an automatic and habitual debate on his part, Section Four in Car Three—the next car forward—and departed at the heels of the porter. Connery watched more closely, as now it came the turn of the young man whose ticket bore the name of Eaton. Like the Englishman with the same sort of ticket from Asia, Eaton had no reservation in the sleepers; he appeared, however, to have some preference as to where he slept.

"Give me a Three, if you have one," he requested of the Pullman conductor. His voice, Connery noted, was well modulated, rather deep, distinctly pleasant. At sound of it, Dorne, who with his daughter's help was settling himself in his section, turned and looked that way and said something in a low tone to the girl. Harriet Dorne also looked, and with her eyes on Eaton, Connery saw her reply inaudibly, rapidly and at some length.

"I can give you Three in Car Three, opposite the gentleman I just assigned," the Pullman conductor offered.

"That'll do very well," Eaton answered in the same pleasant voice.

As the porter now took his bags, Eaton followed him out of the car. Connery looked around the sleeper; then, having allowed a moment to pass so that he would not too obviously seem to be following Eaton, he went after them into the next car. He expected, rather, that Eaton would at once identify himself to him as the passenger to whom President Jarvis' short note had referred. Eaton, however, paid no attention to him, but was busy taking off his coat and settling himself in his section as Connery passed.

The conductor, willing that Eaton should choose his own time for identifying himself, passed slowly on, looking over the passengers as he went. The cars were far from full.

Besides Eaton, Connery saw but half a dozen people in this car: the Englishman in Section Four; two young girls of about nineteen and twenty and their parents—uninquisitive-looking, unobtrusive, middle-aged people who possessed the drawing-room; and an alert, red-haired, professional-looking man of forty whose baggage was marked "D. S.—Chicago." Connery had had nothing to do with putting Eaton in this car, but his survey of it gave him satisfaction; if President Jarvis inquired, he could be told that Eaton had not been put near to undesirable neighbors. The next car forward, perhaps, would have been even better; for Connery saw, as he entered it, that but one of its sections was occupied. The next, the last Pullman, was quite well filled; beyond this was the diner. Connery stood a few moments in conversation with the dining car conductor; then he retraced his way through the train. He again passed Eaton, slowing so that the young man could speak to him if he wished, and even halting an instant to exchange a word with the Englishman; but Eaton allowed him to pass on without speaking to him. Connery's step quickened as he entered the next car on his way back to the smoking compartment of the observation car, where he expected to compare sheets with the Pullman conductor before taking up the tickets. As he entered this car, however, Avery stopped him.

"Mr. Dorne would like to speak to you," Avery said. The tone was very like a command.

Connery stopped beside the section, where the man with the spectacles sat with his daughter. Dorne looked up at him.

"You are the train conductor?" he asked, seeming either unsatisfied of this by Connery's presence or merely desirous of a formal answer.

"Yes, sir," Connery replied.

Dorne fumbled in his inner pocket and brought out a card-case, which he opened, and produced a card. Connery, glancing at the card while the other still held it, saw that it was President Jarvis' visiting card, with the president's name in engraved block letters; across its top was written briefly in Jarvis' familiar hand, "This is the passenger"; and below, it was signed with the same scrawl of initials which had been on the note Connery had received that morning—"H. R. J."

Connery's hand shook as, while trying to recover himself, he took the card and looked at it more closely, and he felt within him the sinking sensation which follows an escape from danger. He saw that his too ready and too assured assumption that Eaton was the man to whom Jarvis' note had referred, had almost led him into the sort of mistake which is unpardonable in a "trusted" man; he had come within an ace, he realized, of speaking to Eaton and so betraying the presence on the train of a traveler whose journey his superiors were trying to keep secret.

"You need, of course, hold the train no longer," Dorne said to Connery.

"Yes, sir; I received word from Mr. Jarvis about you, Mr. Dorne. I shall follow his instructions fully." Connery recalled the discussion about the drawing-room which had been given to Dorne's daughter. "I shall see that the Pullman conductor moves some one in one of the other cars to have a compartment for you, sir."

"I prefer a place in the open car," Dorne replied. "I am well situated here. Do not disturb any one."

As he went forward again after the train was under way, Connery tried to recollect how it was that he had been led into such a mistake, and defending himself, he laid it all to old Sammy. But old Sammy was not often mistaken in his identifications. If Eaton was not the person for whom the train was held, might he be some one else of importance? Now as he studied Eaton, he could not imagine what had made him accept this passenger as a person of great position. It was only when he passed Eaton a third time, half an hour later, when the train had long left Seattle, that the half-shaped hazards and guesses about the passenger suddenly sprang into form. Connery stood and stared back. Eaton did not look like any one whom he remembered having seen; but he fitted perfectly some one whose description had been standing for ten days in every morning and evening edition of the Seattle papers. Yes, allowing for a change of clothes and a different way of brushing his hair, Eaton was exactly the man whom Warden had expected at his house and who had come there and waited while Warden, away in his car, was killed.

Connery was walking back through the train, absent-minded in trying to decide whether he could be at all sure of this from the mere printed description, and trying to decide what he should do if he felt sure, when Mr. Dorne stopped him.

"Conductor, do you happen to know," he questioned, "who the young man is who took Section Three in the car forward?"

Connery gasped; but the question put to him the impossibility of his being sure of any recognition from the description. "He gave his name on his ticket as Philip D. Eaton, sir," Connery replied.

"Is that all you know about him?"

"Yes, sir."

"If you find out anything about him, let me know," Dorne bade.

"Yes, sir." Connery moved away and soon went back to look again at Eaton. Had Mr. Dorne also seen the likeness of Eaton in the published descriptions of the man whom Warden had said was most outrageously wronged? the man for whom Warden had been willing to risk his life, who afterwards had not dared to come forward to aid the police with anything he might know? Connery determined to let nothing interfere with learning more of Eaton; Dorne's request only gave him added responsibility.

Dorne, however, was not depending upon Connery alone for further information. As soon as the conductor had gone, he turned back to his daughter and Avery upon the seat opposite.

"Avery," he said in a tone of direction, "I wish you to get in conversation with this Philip Eaton. It will probably be useful if you let Harriet talk with him too. She would get impressions helpful to me which you can't."

The girl started with surprise but recovered at once. "Yes, Father," she said.

"What, sir?" Avery ventured to protest.

CHAPTER III

MISS DORNE MEETS EATON

Dorne motioned Avery to the aisle, where already some of the passengers, having settled their belongings in their sections, were beginning to wander through the cars seeking acquaintances or players to make up a card game. Eaton, however, was not among these. On the contrary, when these approached him in his section, he frankly avoided chance of their speaking to him, by an appearance of complete immersion in his own concerns. The Englishman directly across the aisle from Eaton clearly was not likely to speak to him, or to anybody else, without an introduction; the red-haired man, "D. S.," however, seemed a more expansive personality. Eaton, seeing "D. S." look several times in his direction, pulled a newspaper from the pocket of his overcoat and engrossed himself in it; the newspaper finished, he opened his traveling bag and produced a magazine.

But as the train settled into the steady running which reminded of the days of travel ahead during which the half-dozen cars of the train must create a world in which it would be absolutely impossible to avoid contact with other people, Eaton put the magazine into his traveling bag, took from the bag a handful of cigars with which he filled a plain, uninitialed cigar-case, and went toward the club and observation car in the rear. As he passed through the sleeper next to him,—the last one,—Harriet Dorne glanced up at him and spoke to her father; Dorne nodded but did not look up. Eaton went on into the wide-windowed observation-room beyond, which opened onto the rear platform protected on three sides.

The observation-room was nearly empty. The sleet which had been falling when they left Seattle had changed to huge, heavy flakes of fast-falling snow, which blurred the windows, obscured the landscape and left visible only the two thin black lines of track that, streaming out behind them, vanished fifty feet away in the white smother. The only occupants of the room were a young woman who was reading a magazine, and an elderly man. Eaton chose a seat as far from these two as possible.

He had been there only a few minutes, however, when, looking up, he saw Harriet Dorne and Avery enter the room. They passed him, engaged in conversation, and stood by the rear door looking out into the storm. It was evident to Eaton, although he did not watch them, that they were arguing something; the girl seemed insistent, Avery irritated and unwilling. Her manner showed that she won her point finally. She seated herself in one of the chairs, and Avery left her. He wandered, as if aimlessly, to the reading table, turning over the magazines there; abandoning them, he gazed about as if bored; then, with a wholly casual manner, he came toward Eaton and took the seat beside him.

"Rotten weather, isn't it?" Avery observed somewhat ungraciously.

Eaton could not well avoid reply. "It's been getting worse," he commented, "ever since we left Seattle."

"We're running into it, apparently." Again Avery looked toward Eaton and waited.

"It'll be bad in the mountains, I suspect," Eaton said.

"Yes—lucky if we get through."

The conversation on Avery's part was patently forced; and it was equally forced on Eaton's; nevertheless it continued. Avery introduced the war and other subjects upon which men, thrown together for a time, are accustomed to exchange opinions. But Avery did not do it easily or naturally; he plainly was of the caste whose pose it is to repel, not seek, overtures toward a chance acquaintance. His lack of practice was perfectly obvious when at last he asked directly: "Beg pardon, but I don't think I know your name."

Eaton was obliged to give it.

"Mine's Avery," the other offered; "perhaps you heard it when we were getting our berths assigned."

And again the conversation, enjoyed by neither of them, went on. Finally the girl at the end of the car rose and passed them, as though leaving the car. Avery looked up.

"Where are you going, Harry?"

"I think some one ought to be with Father."

"I'll go in just a minute."

She had halted almost in front of them. Avery, hesitating as though he did not know what he ought to do, finally arose; and as Eaton observed that Avery, having introduced himself, appeared now to consider it his duty to present Eaton to Harriet Dorne, Eaton also arose. Avery murmured the names. Harriet Dorne, resting her hand on the back of Avery's chair, joined in the conversation. As she replied easily and interestedly to a comment of Eaton's, Avery suddenly reminded her of her father. After a minute, when Avery—still ungracious and still irritated over something which Eaton could not guess—rather abruptly left them, she took Avery's seat; and Eaton dropped into his chair beside her.

Now, this whole proceeding—though within the convention which, forbidding a girl to make a man's acquaintance directly, says nothing against her making it through the medium of another man—had been so unnaturally done that Eaton understood that Harriet Dorne deliberately had arranged to make his acquaintance, and that Avery, angry and objecting, had been overruled.

She seemed to Eaton less alertly boyish now than she had looked an hour before when they had boarded the train. Her cheeks were smoothly rounded, her lips rather full, her lashes very long. He could not look up without looking directly at her, for her chair, which had not been moved since Avery left it, was at an angle with his own. A faint, sweet fragrance from her hair and clothing came to him and made him recollect how long it was—five years—since he had talked with, or even been near, such a girl as this; and the sudden tumult of his pulses which her nearness caused warned him to keep watch of what he said until he had learned why she had sought him out.

To avoid the appearance of studying her too openly, he turned slightly, so that his gaze went past her to the white turmoil outside the windows.

"It's wonderful," she said, "isn't it?"

"You mean the storm?" A twinkle of amusement came to Eaton's eyes. "It would be more interesting if it allowed a little more to be seen. At present there is nothing visible but snow."

"Is that the only way it affects you?" She turned to him, apparently a trifle disappointed.

"I don't exactly understand."

"Why, it must affect every man most as it touches his own interests. An artist would think of it as a background for contrasts—a thing to sketch or paint; a writer as something to be written down in words."

Eaton understood. She could not more plainly have asked him what he was.

"And an engineer, I suppose," he said, easily, "would think of it only as an element to be included in his formulas—an x, or an a, or a b, to be put in somewhere and square-rooted or squared so that the roof-truss he was figuring should not buckle under its weight."

"Oh—so that is the way you were thinking of it?"

"You mean," Eaton challenged her directly, "am I an engineer?"

"Are you?"

"Oh, no; I was only talking in pure generalities, just as you were."

"Let us go on, then," she said gayly. "I see I can't conceal from you that I am doing you the honor to wonder what you are. A lawyer would think of it in the light of damage it might create and the subsequent possibilities of litigation." She made a little pause. "A business man would take it into account, as he has to take into account all things in nature or human; it would delay transportation, or harm or aid the winter wheat."

"Or stop competition somewhere," he observed, more interested.

The flash of satisfaction which came to her face and as quickly was checked and faded showed him she thought she was on the right track.

"Business," she said, still lightly, "will—how is it the newspapers put it?—will marshal its cohorts; it will send out its generals in command of brigades of snowplows, its colonels in command of regiments of snow-shovelers and its spies to discover and to bring back word of the effect upon the crops."

"You talk," he said, "as if business were a war."

"Isn't it?—like war, but war in higher terms."

"In higher terms?" he questioned, attempting to make his tone like hers, but a sudden bitterness now was betrayed by it. "Or in lower?"

"Why, in higher," she declared, "demanding greater courage, greater devotion, greater determination, greater self-sacrifice."

"What makes you say that?"

"Soldiers themselves say it, Mr. Eaton, and all the observers in this horrible war say it when they say that they find almost no cowards and very few weaklings among all the millions of every sort of men at the front. They could not say the same of those identical millions under the normal conditions of everyday business life."

He remained silent, though she waited for him to reply.

"You know that is so, Mr. Eaton," she said. "One has only to look on the streets of any great city to find thousands of men who have not had the courage and determination to carry on their share of the ordinary duties of life. Recruiting officers can pick any man off the streets and make a good soldier of him, but no one could be so sure of finding a satisfactory employee in that way. Doesn't that show that daily life, the everyday business of earning a living and bearing one's share in the workaday world, demands greater qualities than war?"

Her face had flushed eagerly as she spoke; a darker, livid flush answered her words on his.

"But the opportunities for evil are greater, too," he asserted almost fiercely.

"What do you mean?"

"For deceit, for lies, for treachery, Miss Dorne! Violence is the evil of war, and violence is the evil most easily punished, even if it does not bring its own punishment upon itself. But how many of those men you speak of on the streets have been deliberately, mercilessly, even savagely sacrificed to some business expediency, their future destroyed, their hope killed!" Some storm of passion, whose meaning she could not divine, was sweeping him.

"You mean," she asked after an instant's silence, "that you, Mr. Eaton, have been sacrificed in such a way?"

"I am still talking in generalities," he denied ineffectively.

He saw that she sensed the untruthfulness of these last words. Her smooth young forehead and her eyes were shadowy with thought. Eaton was uneasily silent. The train roared across some trestle, giving a sharp glimpse of gray, snow-swept water far below. Finally Harriet Dorne seemed to have made her decision.

"I think you should meet my father, Mr. Eaton," she said. "Would you like to?"

He did not reply at once. He knew that his delay was causing her to study him now with greater surprise.

"I would like to meet him, yes," he said, "but,"—he hesitated, tried to avoid answer without offending her, but already he had affronted her,—"but not now, Miss Dorne."

She stared at him, rebuffed and chilled.

"You mean—" The sentence, obviously, was one she felt it better not to finish. As though he recognized that now she must wish the conversation to end, he got up. She rose stiffly.

"I'll see you into your car, if you're returning there," he offered.

Neither spoke, as he went with her into the next car; and at the section where her father sat, Eaton bowed silently, nodded to Avery, who coldly returned his nod, and left her. Eaton went on into his own car and sat down, his thoughts in mad confusion.

How near he had come to talking to this girl about himself, even though, he had felt from the first that that was what she was trying to make him do! Was he losing his common sense? Was the self-command on which he had so counted that he had dared to take this train deserting him? He felt that he must not see Harriet Dorne again alone. At first this was all he felt; but as he sat, pale and quiet, staring vacantly at the snow-flakes which struck and melted on the window beside him, his thoughts grew more clear. In Avery he had recognized, by that instinct which so strangely divines the personalities one meets, an enemy from the start; Dorne's attitude toward him, of course, was not yet defined; as for Harriet Dorne—he could not tell whether she was prepared to be his enemy or friend.

CHAPTER IV

TRUCE

The Eastern Express, mantled in a seething whirl of snow, but still maintaining very nearly its scheduled time and even regaining a few lost minutes from hour to hour as, now well past the middle of the State, it sped on across the flatter country in its approach to the mountains, proceeded monotonously through the afternoon. Eaton watched the chill of the snow battle against the warmth of the double windows on the windward side of the car, until finally it conquered and the windows became—as he knew the rest of the outside of the cars must have been long before—merely a wall of white. This coating, thickening steadily with the increasing severity of the storm as they approached the Rockies, dimmed the afternoon daylight within the car to dusk.

Presently all became black outside the windows, and the passengers from the rear cars filed forward to the dining car and then back to their places again. Eaton took care to avoid the Dorne party in the diner. Soon the porter began making up the berths to be occupied that night; but as yet no one was retiring. The train was to reach Spokane late in the evening; there would be a stop there for half an hour; and after the long day on the train, every one seemed to be waiting up for a walk about the station before going to bed. But as the train slowed, and with a sudden diminishing of the clatter of the fishplates under its wheels and of the puffings of exhausted steam, slipped into the lighted trainsheds at the city, Eaton sat for some minutes in thought. Then he dragged his overcoat down from its hook, buttoned it tightly about his throat, pulled his traveling cap down on his head and left the car. All along the train, vestibule doors of the Pullmans had been opened, and the passengers were getting out, while a few others, snow-covered and with hand-luggage, came to board the train. Eaton, turning to survey the sleet-shrouded car he had left, found himself face to face with Miss Dorne, standing alone upon the station platform.

Her piquant, beautiful face was half hidden in the collar of the great fur coat she had worn on boarding the train, and her cheeks were ruddy with the bite of the crisp air.

"You see before you a castaway," she volunteered, smiling.

He felt it necessary to take the same tone. "A castaway?" he questioned. "Cast away by whom?"

"By Mr. Avery, if you must know, though your implication that anybody should have cast me away—anybody at all, Mr. Eaton—is unpleasant."

"There was no implication; it was simply inquiry."

"You should have put it, then, in some other form; you should have asked how I came to be in so surprising a position."

"'How,' in this part of the country, Miss Dorne, is not regarded as a question, but merely as a form of salutation," he bantered. "It was formerly employed by the Indian aborigines inhabiting these parts, who exchanged 'How's' when passing each other on the road. If I had said 'How,' you might simply have replied 'How,' and I should have been under the necessity of considering the incident closed."

She laughed. "You do not wish it to be closed."

"Not till I know more about it."

"Very well; you shall know more. Mr. Avery brought me out to take a walk. He remembered, after bringing me as far as this, that we had not asked my father whether he had any message to be sent from here or any commission to execute; so he went back to find out. I have now waited so many minutes that I feel sure it is my father who has detained him. The imperfectly concealed meaning of what I am telling you is that I consider that Mr. Avery, by his delay, has forfeited his right. The further implication—for I do imply things, Mr. Eaton—is that you cannot very well avoid offering to take the post of duty he has abandoned."

"You mean walk with you?"

"I do."

He slipped his hand inside her arm, sustaining her slight, active body against the wind which blew strongly through the station and scattered over them snow-flakes blown from the roofs of the cars, as they walked forward along the train. Her manner had told him that she meant to ignore her resentment of the morning; but as, turning, they commenced to walk briskly up and down the platform, he found he was not wholly right in this.

"You must admit, Mr. Eaton, that I am treating you very well."

"In pardoning an offense where no offense was meant?"

"It is partly that—that I realized no offense was meant. Partly it is because I do not pass judgment on things I do not understand. I could imagine no possible reason for your very peculiar refusal."

"Not even that I might be perhaps the sort of person who ought not to be introduced into your party in quite that way?"

"That least of all. Persons of that sort do not admit themselves to be such; and if I have lived for twen—I shall not tell you just how many years—the sort of life I have been obliged to live almost since I was born, without learning to judge men in that respect, I must have failed to use my opportunities."

"Thank you," he returned quietly; then, as he recollected his instinctive prejudice against Avery: "However, I am not so sure."

She plainly waited for him to go on, but he pretended to be concerned wholly with guiding her along the platform.

"Mr. Eaton!"

"Yes."

"Do you know that you are a most peculiar man?"

"Exactly in what way, Miss Dorne?"

"In this: The ordinary man, when a woman shows any curiosity about himself, answers with a fullness and particularity and eagerness which seems to say, 'At last you have found a subject which interests me!'"

"Does he?"

"Is that the only reply you care to make?"

"I can think of none more adequate."

"Meaning that after my altogether too open display of curiosity regarding you, I can still do nothing better than guess, without any expectation that you, on your part, will deign to tell me whether I am right or wrong. Very well; my first guess is that you have not done much walking with young women on station platforms—certainly not much of late."

"I'll try to do better, if you'll tell me how you know that?"

"You do very well. I was not criticising you, and I don't have to tell why. Ask no questions; it is a clairvoyant diviner who is speaking."

"Divinity?"

"Diviner only. My second guess is that you have been abroad in far lands."

"My railroad ticket showed as much as that."

"Pardon me, if it seriously injures your self-esteem; but I was not sufficiently interested in you when you came aboard the train, to observe your ticket. What I know is divined from the exceedingly odd and reminiscent way in which you look at all things about you—at this train, this station, the people who pass."

"You find nothing reminiscent, I suppose, in the way I look at you?"

"You do yourself injustice. You do not look at me at all, so I cannot tell; but there could hardly be any reminiscence extending beyond this morning, since you never saw me before then."

"No; this is all fresh experience."

"I hope it is not displeasing. My doubt concerning your evidently rather long absence abroad is as to whether you went away to get or to forget."

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand."

"Those are the two reasons for which young men go to Asia, are they not?—to get something or to forget something. At least, so I have been given to understand. Shall I go on?"

"Go on guessing, you mean? I don't seem able to prevent it."

"Then my third guess is this—and you know no one is ever allowed more than three guesses." She hesitated; when she went on, she had entirely dropped her tone of banter. "I guess, Mr. Eaton, that you have been—I think, are still—going through some terrible experience which has endured for a very long time—perhaps even for years—and has nearly made of you and perhaps even yet may make of you something far different and—and something far less pleasing than you—you must have been before. There! I have transcended all bounds, said everything I should not have said, and left unsaid all the conventional things which are all that our short acquaintance could have allowed. Forgive me—because I'm not sorry."

He made no answer. They walked as far as the rear of the train, turned and came back before she spoke again:

"What is it they are doing to the front of our train, Mr. Eaton?"

He looked. "They are putting a plow on the engine."

"Oh!"

"That seems to be only the ordinary push-plow, but if what I have been overhearing is correct, the railroad people are preparing to give you one of the minor exhibitions of that everyday courage of which you spoke this morning, Miss Dorne."

"In what particular way?"

"When we get across the Idaho line and into the mountains, you are to ride behind a double-header driving a rotary snow-plow."

"A double-header? You mean two locomotives?"

"Yes; the preparation is warrant that what is ahead of us in the way of travel will fully come up to anything you may have been led to expect." They stood a minute watching the trainmen; as they turned, his gaze went past her to the rear cars. "Also," he added, "Mr. Avery, with his usual gracious pleasure at my being in your company, is hailing you from the platform of your car."

She looked up at Eaton sharply, seemed about to speak, and then checked what was upon her tongue. "You are going into your own car?" She held out to him her small gloved hand. "Good-by, then—until we see one another again."

"Good night, Miss Dorne."

He took her hand and retaining it hardly the fraction of an instant, let it go. Was it her friendship she had been offering him? Men use badinage without respect to what their actual feelings may be; women—some memory from the past in which he had known such girls as this, seemed to recall—use it most frequently when their feelings, consciously or unconsciously, are drawing toward a man.

Eaton now went into the men's compartment of his car, where he sat smoking till after the train was under way again. The porter looked in upon him there to ask if he wished his berth made up now; Eaton nodded assent, and fifteen minutes later, dropping the cold end of his cigar and going out into the car, he found the berth ready for him. "D. S.'s" section, also made up but with the curtains folded back displaying the bedding within, was unoccupied; jerkings of the curtains, and voices and giggling in the two berths at the end of the car, showed that Amy and Constance were getting into bed; the Englishman was wide awake in plain determination not to go to bed until his accustomed Nottingham hour. Eaton, drawing his curtains together and buttoning them from the inside, undressed and went to bed. A half-hour later the passage of some one through the aisle and the sudden dimming of the crack of light which showed above the curtains told him that the lights in the car had been turned down. Eaton closed his eyes, but sleep was far from him.

Presently he began to feel the train beginning to labor with the increasing grade and the deepening snow. It was well across the State line and into Idaho; it was nearing the mountains, and the weather was getting colder and the storm more severe. Eaton lifted the curtain from the window beside him and leaned on one elbow to look out. The train was running through a bleak, white desolation; no light and no sign of habitation showed anywhere. Eaton lay staring out, and now the bleak world about him seemed to assume toward him a cruel and merciless aspect. The events of the day ran through his mind again with sinister suggestion. He had taken that train for a certain definite, dangerous purpose which required his remaining as obscure and as inconspicuous as possible; yet already he had been singled out for attention. So far, he was sure, he had received no more than that—attention, curiosity concerning him. He had not suffered recognition; but that might come at any moment. Could he risk longer waiting to act?

He dropped on his back upon the bed and lay with his hands clasped under his head, his eyes staring up at the roof of the car.

In the card-room of the observation car, playing and conversation still went on for a time; then it diminished as one by one the passengers went away to bed. Connery, looking into this car, found it empty and the porter cleaning up; he slowly passed on forward through the train, stopping momentarily in the rear Pullman opposite the berth of the passenger whom President Jarvis had commended to his care. His scrutiny of the car told him all was correct here; the even breathing within the berth assured him the passenger slept.

Connery went on through to the next car and paused again outside the berth occupied by Eaton. He had watched Eaton all day with results that still he was debating with himself; he had found in a newspaper the description of the man who had waited at Warden's, and he reread it, comparing it with Eaton. It perfectly confirmed Connery's first impression; but the more Connery had seen of Eaton, and the more he had thought over him during the day, the more the conductor had become satisfied that either Eaton was not the man described or, if he was, there was no harm to come from it. After all, was not all that could be said against Eaton—if he was the man—simply that he had not appeared to state why Warden was befriending him? Was it not possible that he was serving Warden in some way by not appearing? Certainly Mr. Dorne, who was the man most on the train to be considered, had satisfied himself that Eaton was fit for an acquaintance; Connery had seen what was almost a friendship, apparently, spring up between Eaton and Dorne's daughter during the day.

The conductor went on, his shoulders brushing the buttoned curtains on both sides of the narrow aisle. Except for the presence of the passenger in the rear sleeper, this inspection was to the conductor the uttermost of the commonplace; in its monotonous familiarity he had never felt any strangeness in this abrupt and intimate bringing together of people who never had seen one another before, who after these few days of travel together, might probably never see one another again, but who now slept separated from one another and from the persons passing through the cars by no greater protection than these curtains designed only to shield them from the light and from each other's eyes. He felt no strangeness in this now. He merely assured himself by his scrutiny that within his train all was right. Outside—

Connery was not so sure of that; rather, he had been becoming more certain hour by hour all through the evening, that they were going to have great difficulty in getting the train through. Though he knew by President Jarvis' note that the officials of the road must be watching the progress of this especial train with particular interest, he had received no train-orders from the west for several hours. His inquiry at the last stop had told him the reason for this; the telegraph wires to the west had gone down. To the east, communication was still open, but how long it would remain so he could not guess. Here in the deep heart of the great mountains—they had passed the Idaho boundary-line into Montana—they were getting the full effect of the storm; their progress, increasingly slow, was broken by stops which were becoming more frequent and longer as they struggled on. As now they fought their way slower and slower up a grade, and barely topping it, descended the opposite slope at greater speed as the momentum of the train was added to the engine-power, Connery's mind went back to the second sleeper with its single passenger, and he spoke to the Pullman conductor, who nodded and went toward that car. The weather had prevented the expected increase of their number of passengers at Spokane; only a few had got aboard there; there were worse grades ahead, in climbing which every pound of weight would count; so Connery—in the absence of orders and with Jarvis' note in his pocket—had resolved to drop the second sleeper.

At Fracroft—the station where he was to exchange the ordinary plow which so far had sufficed, and couple on the "rotary" to fight the mountain drifts ahead—he swung himself down from the train, looked in at the telegraph office and then went forward to the two giant locomotives, on whose sweating, monstrous backs the snow, suddenly visible in the haze of their lights, melted as it fell. He waited on the station platform while the second sleeper was cut out and the train made up again. Then, as they started, he swung aboard and in the brightly lighted men's compartment of the first Pullman checked up his report-sheets with a stub of pencil. They had stopped again, he noticed; now they were climbing a grade, more easily because of the decrease of weight; now a trestle rumbled under the wheels, telling him just where they were. Next was the powerful, steady push against opposition—the rotary was cutting its way through a drift.

Again they stopped—once more went on. Connery, having put his papers into his pocket, dozed, awoke, dozed again. The snow was certainly heavy, and the storm had piled it up across the cuts in great drifts which kept the rotary struggling almost constantly now. The progress of the train halted again and again; several times it backed, charged forward again—only to stop, back and charge again and then go on. But this did not disturb Connery. Then something went wrong. All at once he found himself, by a trainman's instinctive and automatic action, upon his feet; for the shock had been so slight as barely to be felt, far too slight certainly to have awakened any of the sleeping passengers in their berths. He went to the door of the car, lifted the platform stop, threw open the door of the vestibule and hanging by one hand to the rail, swung himself out from the side of the car to look ahead. He saw the forward one of the two locomotives wrapped in clouds of steam, and men arm-deep in snow wallowing forward to the rotary still further to the front, and the sight confirmed fully his apprehension that this halt was more important and likely to last much longer than those that had gone before.

CHAPTER V

ARE YOU HILLWARD?

It is the wonder of the moment of first awakening that one—however tried or troubled he may be when complete recollection returns—may find, at first, rehearsal of only what is pleasant in his mind. Eaton, waking and stretching himself luxuriously in his berth in the reverie halfway between sleep and full consciousness, found himself supremely happy. His feelings, before recollection came to check them, reminded him only that he had been made an acquaintance, almost a friend, the day before, by a wonderful, inspiring, beautiful girl. Then suddenly, into his clearing memory crushed and crowded the reason for his being where he was. By an instinctive jerk of his shoulders, almost a shudder, he drew the sheet and blanket closer about him; the smile was gone from his lips; he lay still, staring upward at the berth above his head and listening to the noises in the car.

The bell in the washroom at the end of the car was ringing violently, and some one was reinforcing his ring with a stentorian call for "Porter! Porter!"

Eaton realized that it was very cold in his berth—also that the train, which was standing still, had been in that motionless condition for some time. He threw up the window curtain as he appreciated that and, looking out, found that he faced a great unbroken bank of glistening white snow as high as the top of the car at this point and rising even higher ahead. He listened, therefore, while the Englishman—for the voice calling to the porter was his—extracted all available information from the negro.

"Porter!" Standish called again.

"Yessuh!"

"Close my window and be quick about it!"

"It's closed, suh."

"Closed?"

"Yessuh; I shut it en-durin' the night."

"Closed!" the voice behind the curtains iterated skeptically; there was a pause during which, probably, there was limited exploration. "I say, then, how cold is it outside?"

"Ten below this morning, suh."

"What, what? Where are we?"

"Between Fracroft and Simons, suh."

"Yet?"

"Yessuh, yit!"

"Hasn't your silly train moved since four o'clock?"

"Moved? No, suh. Not mo'n a yahd or two nohow, suh, and I reckon we backed them up again."

"That foolish snow still?"

"Yessuh; and snow some more, suh."

"But haven't we the plow still ahead?"

"Oh, yessuh; the plow's ahaid. We still got it; but that's all, suh. It ain't doin' much; it's busted."

"Eh—what?"

"Yessuh—busted! There was right smart of a slide across the track, and the crew, I understands, diagnosed it jus' fo' a snowbank and done bucked right into it. But they was rock in this, suh; we's layin' right below a hill; and that rock jus' busted that rotary like a Belgium shell hit it. Yessuh—pieces of that rotary essentially scattered themselves in four directions besides backwards and fo'wards. We ain't done much travelin' since then."

"Ah! But the restaurant car's still attached?"

"De restaur—oh, yessuh. We carries the diner through—from the Coast to Chicago."

"H'm! Ten below! Porter, is that wash-compartment hot? And are they serving breakfast yet?"

"Yessuh; yessuh!"

The Briton, from behind his curtains, continued; but Eaton no longer paid attention.

"Snowed in and stopped since four!" The realization startled him with the necessity of taking it into account in his plans. He jerked himself up in his berth and began pulling his clothes down from the hooks; then, as abruptly, he stopped dressing and sat absorbed in thought. Finally he parted the curtains and looked out into the aisle.

The Englishman, having elicited all he desired, or could draw, from the porter, now bulged through his curtains and stood in the aisle, unabashed, in gaudy pajamas and slippers, while he methodically bundled his clothes under his arm; then, still garbed only in pajamas, he paraded majestically to the washroom. The curtains over the berths at the other end of the car also bulged and emitted the two dark-haired girls. They were completely kimono-ed over any temporary deficiency of attire and skipped to the drawing-room inhabited by their parents. The drawing-room door instantly opened at Amy's knock, admitted the girls and shut again. Section Seven gave to the aisle the reddish-haired D. S. He carried coat, collar, hairbrushes and shaving case and went to join the Briton in the men's washroom.

There was now no one else in the main part of the car; and no berths other than those already accounted for had been made up. Yet Eaton still delayed; his first impulse to get up and dress had been lost in the intensity of the thought in which he was engaged. He had let himself sink back against the pillows, while he stared, unseeingly, at the solid bank of snow beside the car, when the door at the further end of the coach opened and Conductor Connery entered, calling a name. "Mr. Hillward! Mr. Lawrence Hillward! Telegram for Mr. Hillward!"

Eaton started at the first call of the name; he sat up and faced about.

"Mr. Hillward! Telegram for Mr. Lawrence Hillward!"

The conductor was opposite Section Three; Eaton now waited tensely and delayed until the conductor was past; then putting his head out of his curtains and assuring himself that the car was otherwise empty as when he had seen it last, he hailed as the conductor was going through the door.

"What name? Who is that telegram for?"

"Mr. Lawrence Hillward."

"Oh, thank you; then that's mine." He put his hand out between the curtains to take the yellow envelope.

Connery held back. "I thought your name was Eaton."

"It is. Mr. Hillward—Lawrence Hillward—is an associate of mine who expected to make this trip with me but could not. So I should have telegrams or other communications addressed to him. Is there anything to sign?"

"No, sir—train delivery. It's not necessary."

Eaton drew his curtains close again and ripped the envelope open; but before reading the message, he observed with alarm that his pajama jacket had opened across the chest, and a small round scar, such as that left by a high-powered bullet penetrating, was exposed. He gasped almost audibly, realizing this, and clapped his hand to his chest and buttoned his jacket. The message—nine words without signature—lay before him:

Thicket knot youngster omniscient issue foliage lecture tragic instigation.

It was some code which Eaton recognized but could not decipher at once. It was of concern, but at that instant, less of concern than to know whether his jacket had been open and his chest exposed when he took the message. The conductor was still standing in the aisle.

"When did you get this?" Eaton asked, looking out.

"Just now."

"How could you get it here?" Eaton questioned, watching the conductor's face.

"We've had train instruments—the emergency telegraph—on the wires since four o'clock and just got talking with the stations east; wires are still down to the west. That message came through yesterday some time and was waiting for you at Simons; when we got them this morning, they sent it on."

"I see; thanks." Eaton, assured that if the conductor had seen anything, he suspected no significance in what he saw, closed his curtains and buttoned them carefully. The conductor moved on. Eaton took a small English-Chinese pocket-dictionary from his vest pocket and opened it under cover of the blanket; counting five words up from thicket he found they; five down from knot gave him know; six up from youngster was you; six down from omniscient was one; seven up from issue was is; and so continuing, he translated the nine words to:

"They know you. One is following. Leave train instantly."

Eaton, nervous and jerky, as he completed the first six words, laughed as he compiled the final three. "Leave train instantly!" The humor of that advice in his present situation, as he looked out the window at the solid bank of snow, appealed to him. He slapped the little dictionary shut and returned it to his pocket. A waiter from the dining car came back, announcing the first call for breakfast, and spurred him into action. Passengers from the Pullman at the rear passed Eaton's section for the diner. He glanced out at the first two or three; then he heard Harriet Dorne's voice in some quiet, conventional remark to the man who followed her. Eaton started at it; then he dressed swiftly and hurried into the now deserted washroom and then on to breakfast.

The dining car, all gleaming crystal and silver and white covers within, also was surrounded by snow. The space outside the windows seemed somewhat wider than that about the sleeping car. And a moment before Eaton went forward, the last cloud had cleared and the sun had come out bright. The train was still quite motionless; the great drifts of snow, even with the tops of the cars on either side, made perfectly plain how hopeless it would be to try to proceed without the plow; and the heavy white frost which had not yet cleared from some of the window-panes, told graphically of the cold without. But the dining car was warm and cheerful, and it gave assurance that, if the train was helpless to move, it at least offered luxuries in its idleness. As Eaton stepped inside the door, the car seemed all cheer and good spirits.

Fresh red carnations and ruddy roses were, as usual, in the cut-glass vases on the white cloths; the waiters bore steaming pots of coffee and bowls of hot cereals to the different tables. These, as usual, were ten in number—five with places for four persons each, on one side of the aisle, and five, each with places for two persons, beside the windows on the other side of the car.

Harriet Dorne was sitting facing the door at the second of the larger tables; opposite her, and with his back to Eaton, sat Donald Avery. A third place was laid beside the girl, as though they expected Dorne to join them; but they had begun their fruit without waiting. The girl glanced up as Eaton halted in the doorway; her blue eyes brightened with a look part friendliness, part purpose. She smiled and nodded, and Avery turned about.

"Good morning, Mr. Eaton," the girl greeted.

"Good morning, Miss Dorne," Eaton replied collectedly. He nodded also to Avery, who, stiffly returning the nod, turned back again to Miss Dorne.

Amy and Constance, with their parents, occupied the third large table; the other three large tables were empty. "D. S." was alone at the furthest of the small tables; a traveling-salesman-looking person was washing down creamed Finnan haddock with coffee at the next; the passenger who had been alone in the second car was at the third; the Englishman, Standish, was beginning his iced grape-fruit at the table opposite Miss Dorne; and at the place nearest the door, an insignificant broad-shouldered and untidy young man, who had boarded the train at Spokane, had just spilled half a cup of coffee over the egg spots on his lapels as his unsteady and nicotine-stained fingers all but dropped the cup.

The dining car conductor, in accordance with the general determination to reserve the larger tables for parties traveling together, pulled back the chair opposite the untidy man; but Eaton, with a sharp sense of disgust, went past to the chair opposite the Englishman.

As he was about to seat himself there, the girl again looked up. "Oh, Mr. Eaton," she smiled, "wouldn't you like to sit with us? I don't think Father is coming to breakfast now; and if he does, of course there's still room."

She pulled back the chair beside her enticingly; and Eaton accepted it.

"Good morning, Mr. Avery," he said to Miss Dorne's companion formally as he sat down, and the man across the table murmured something perforce.

As Eaton ordered his breakfast, he appreciated for the first time that his coming had interrupted a conversation—or rather a sort of monologue of complaint on the part of Standish addressed impersonally to Avery.

"Extraordinarily exposed in these sleeping cars of yours, isn't one, wouldn't you say?" the Englishman appealed across the aisle.

"Exposed?" Avery repeated, more inclined to encourage the conversation.

"I say, is it quite the custom for a train servant—whenever he fancies he should—to reach across one, sleeping?"

"He means the porter closed his window during the night," Eaton explained to Avery.

"Quite so; and I knew nothing about it—nothing at all. Fancy! There was I in the bunk, and the beggar comes along, pulls my curtains aside, reaches across me—"

"It got very cold in the night," Avery offered.

"I know; but is that any reason for the beggar invading my bunk that way? He might have done anything to me! Any one in the car might have done anything to me! Any one in your bally corridor-train might have done anything. There was I, asleep—quite unconscious; people passing up and down the aisle just the other side of a foolish fall of curtain! How does any one know one of those people might not be an enemy of mine? Remarkable people, you Americans—inconsistent, I say. Lock your homes with most complicated fastenings—greatest lock-makers in the world—burglar alarms on windows; but when you travel, expose yourselves as one wouldn't dream of exposing oneself elsewhere. Amazing places, your Pullman coaches! Why, any one might do anything to any one! What's to stop him, what?"

Eaton, suddenly reminded of his telegram, put a hand into his pocket and fingered the torn scraps; he had meant to remove and destroy them, but had forgotten. He glanced at Harriet Dorne.

"What he says is quite true," she observed. She was smiling, however, as most of the other passengers were, at the Englishman's vehemence.

They engaged in conversation as they breakfasted—a conversation in which Avery took almost no part, though Miss Dorne tried openly to draw him in; then the sudden entrance of Connery, followed closely by a stout, brusque man who belonged to the rear Pullman, took Eaton's attention and hers.

Other passengers also looked up; and the nervous, untidy young man at the table near the door again slopped coffee over himself as the conductor gazed about.

"Which is him?" the man with Connery demanded loudly.

Connery checked him, but pointed at the same time to Eaton.

"That's him, is it?" the other man said. "Then go ahead."

Eaton observed that Avery, who had turned in his seat, was watching this diversion on the part of the conductor with interest. Connery stopped beside Eaton's seat.

"You took a telegram for Lawrence Hillward this morning," he asserted.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because it was mine, or meant for me, as I said at the time. My name is Eaton; but Mr. Hillward expected to make this trip with me."

The stout man with the conductor forced himself forward.

"That's pretty good, but not quite good enough!" he charged. "Conductor, get that telegram for me!"

Eaton got up, controlling himself under the insult of the other's manner.

"What business is it of yours?" he demanded.

"What business? Why, only that I'm Lawrence Hillward—that's all, my friend! What are you up to, anyway? Lawrence Hillward traveling with you! I never set eyes on you until I saw you on this train; and you take my telegram!" The charge was made loudly and distinctly; every one in the dining car—Eaton could not see every one, but he knew it was so—had put down fork or cup or spoon and was staring at him. "What did you do it for? What did you want with it?" the stout man blared on. "Did you think I wasn't on the train? What?

"I was in the washroom," he continued, roaring for the benefit of the car, "when the conductor went by with it. I couldn't take the telegram then—so I waited for the conductor to come back. When I got dressed, I found him, and he said you'd claimed my message. Say, hand it over now! What were you up to? What did you do that for?"

Eaton felt he was paling as he faced the blustering smaller man. He realized that the passengers he could see—those at the smaller tables—already had judged his explanation and found him wanting; the others unquestionably had done the same. Avery was gazing up at him with a sort of contented triumph.

"The telegram was for me, Conductor," he repeated.

"Get that telegram, Conductor!" the stout man demanded again.

"I suppose," Connery suggested, "you have letters or a card or something, Mr. Eaton, to show your relationship to Lawrence Hillward."

"No; I have not."

The man asserting himself as Hillward grunted.

"Have you anything to show you are Lawrence Hillward?" Eaton demanded of him.

"Did you tell any one on the train that your name was Hillward before you wanted this telegram?"

It was Harriet Dorne's voice which interposed; and Eaton felt his pulse leap as she spoke for him.

"I never gave any other name than Lawrence Hillward," the other declared.

Connery gazed from one claimant to the other. "Will you give this gentleman the telegram?" he asked Eaton.

"I will not."

"Then I shall furnish him another copy; it was received here on the train by our express-clerk as the operator. I'll go forward and get him another copy."

"That's for you to decide," Eaton said; and as though the matter was closed for him, he resumed his seat. He was aware that, throughout the car, the passengers were watching him curiously; he would have foregone the receipt of the telegram rather than that attention should be attracted to him in this way. Avery was still gazing at him with that look of quiet satisfaction; Eaton had not dared, as yet, to look at Harriet Dorne. When, constraining himself to a manner of indifference, he finally looked her way, she began to chat with him as lightly as before. Whatever effect the incident just closed had had upon the others, it appeared to have had none at all upon her.

"Are you ready to go back to our car now, Harriet?" Avery inquired when she had finished her breakfast, though Eaton was not yet through.

"Surely there's no hurry about anything to-day," the girl returned. They waited until Eaton had finished.

"Shall we all go back to the observation car and see if there's a walk down the track or whether it's snowed over?" she said impartially to the two. They went through the Pullmans together.

The first Pullman contained four or five passengers; the next, in which Eaton had his berth, was still empty as they passed through. The porter had made up all the berths, and only luggage and newspapers and overcoats occupied the seats. The next Pullman also, at first glance, seemed to have been deserted in favor of the diner forward or of the club-car further back. The porter had made up all the berths there also, except one; but some one still was sleeping behind the curtains of Section Three, for a man's hand hung over the aisle. It was a gentleman's hand, with long, well-formed fingers, sensitive and at the same time strong. That was the berth of Harriet Dorne's father; Eaton gazed down at the hand as he approached the section, and then he looked up quickly to the girl. She had observed the hand, as also had Avery; but, plainly, neither of them noticed anything strange either in its posture or appearance. Their only care had been to avoid brushing against it on their way down the aisle so as not to disturb the man behind the curtain; but Eaton, as he saw the hand, started.

He was the last of the three to pass, and so the others did not notice his start; but so strong was the fascination of the hand in the aisle that he turned back and gazed at it before going on into the last car. Some eight or ten passengers—men and women—were lounging in the easy-chairs of the observation-room; a couple, ulstered and fur-capped, were standing on the platform gazing back from the train.

The sun was still shining, and the snow had stopped some hours before; but the wind which had brought the storm was still blowing, and evidently it had blown a blizzard after the train stopped at four that morning. The canyon through the snowdrifts, bored by the giant rotary plow the night before, was almost filled; drifts of snow eight or ten feet high and, in places, pointing still higher, came up to the rear of the train; the end of the platform itself was buried under three feet of snow; the men standing on the platform could barely look over the higher drifts.

"There's no way from the train in that direction now," Harriet Dorne lamented as she saw this.

"There was no way five minutes after we stopped," one of the men standing at the end of the car volunteered. "From Fracroft on—I was the only passenger in sleeper Number Two, and they'd told me to get up; they gave me a berth in another car and cut my sleeper out at Fracroft—we were bucking the drifts about four miles an hour; it seemed to fill in behind about as fast and as thick as we were cutting it out in front. It all drifted in behind as soon as we stopped, the conductor tells me."

The girl made polite acknowledgment and referred to her two companions.

"What shall we do with ourselves, then?"

"Cribbage, Harriet? You and I?" Avery invited.

CHAPTER VI

THE HAND IN THE AISLE

The man whose interest in the passenger in Section Three of the last sleeper was most definite and understandable and, therefore, most openly acute, was Conductor Connery. Connery had passed through the Pullmans several times during the morning—first in the murk of the dawn before the dimmed lamps in the cars had been extinguished; again later, when the passengers had been getting up; and a third time after all the passengers had left their berths except Dorne, and after nearly all the berths had been unmade and the bedding packed away behind the panels overhead. Each time he passed, Connery had seen the hand which hung out into the aisle from between the curtains; but the only definite thought that came to him was that Dorne was a sound sleeper.

Nearly all the passengers had now breakfasted. Connery, therefore, took a seat in the diner, breakfasted leisurely and after finishing, went forward to see what messages had been received as to the relieving snow-plows. Nothing definite yet had been learned; the snow ahead of them was fully as bad as this where they were stopped, and it would be many hours before help could get to them. Connery walked back through the train. Dorne by now must be up, and might wish to see the conductor. Unless Dorne stopped him, however, Connery did not intend to speak to Dorne. The conductor had learned in his many years of service that nothing is more displeasing to the sort of people for whom trains are held than officiousness.

As Connery entered the last sleeper, his gaze fell on the dial of pointers which, communicating with the pushbuttons in the different berths, tell the porter which section is calling him, and he saw that while all the other arrows were pointing upward, the arrow marked "3" was pointing down. Dorne was up, then—for this was the arrow denoting his berth—or at least was awake and had recently rung his bell.

Connery looked in upon the porter, who was cleaning up the washroom.

"Section Three's getting up?" he asked.

"No, Mistah Connery—not yet," the porter answered.

"What did he ring for?" Connery thought Dorne might have asked for him.

"He didn't ring. He ain't moved or stirred this morning."

"He must have rung." Connery looked to the dial, and the porter came out of the washroom and looked at it also.

"Fo' the lan's sake. I didn't hear no ring, Mistah Connery. It mus' have been when I was out on the platform."

"When was that?"

"Jus' now. There ain't been nobody but him in the car for fifteen minutes, and I done turn the pointers all up when the las' passenger went to the diner. It can't be longer than a few minutes, Mistah Connery."

"Answer it, then," Connery directed.

As the negro started to obey, Connery followed him into the open car. He could see over the negro's shoulder the hand sticking out into the aisle, and this time, at sight of it, Connery started violently. If Dorne had rung, he must have moved; a man who is awake does not let his hand hang out into the aisle. Yet the hand had not moved. Nothing was changed about it since Connery had seen it before. The long, sensitive fingers fell in precisely the same position as before, stiffly separated a little one from another; they had not changed their position at all.

"Wait!" Connery seized the porter by the arm. "I'll answer it myself."

He dismissed the negro and waited until he had gone. He looked about and assured himself that the car, except for himself and the man lying behind the curtains of Section Three, was empty. He slowed, as he approached the hand. He halted and stood a moment beside the berth, himself almost breathless as he listened for the sound of breathing within. He heard nothing, though he bent closer to the curtain. Yet he still hesitated, and retreating a little and walking briskly as though he were carelessly passing up the aisle, he brushed hard against the hand and looked back, exclaiming an apology for his carelessness.

The hand fell back heavily, inertly, and resumed its former position and hung as white and lifeless as before. No response to the apology came from behind the curtains; the man in the berth had not roused. Connery rushed back to the curtains and touched the hand with his fingers. It was cold! He seized the hand and felt it all over; then, gasping, he parted the curtains and looked into the berth. He stared; his breath whistled out; his shoulders jerked, and he drew back, instinctively pressing his two clenched hands against his chest and the pocket which held President Jarvis' order.

The man in the berth was lying on his right side facing the aisle; the left side of his face was thus exposed; and it had been crushed in by a violent blow from some heavy weapon which, too blunt to cut the skin and bring blood, had fractured the cheekbone and bludgeoned the temple. The proof of murderous violence was so plain that the conductor, as he saw the face in the light, recoiled with starting eyes, white with horror.

He looked up and down the aisle to assure himself that no one had entered the car during his examination; then he carefully drew the curtains together again, and hurried to the forward end of the car where he had left the porter.

"Lock the rear door of the car," he commanded. "Then come back here."

He gave the negro the keys, and himself waited to prevent any one from entering the car at his end. Looking through the glass of the door, he saw the young man Eaton standing in the vestibule of the car next ahead. Connery hesitated; then he opened the door and beckoned Eaton to him.

"Will you go forward, please," he requested, "and see if there isn't a doctor—"

"You mean the man with red hair in my car?" Eaton inquired.

"That's the one."

Eaton started off without asking any questions. The porter, having locked the rear door of the car, returned and gave Connery back the keys. Connery still waited, until Eaton returned with the red-haired man, "D. S." He let them in and locked the door behind them.

"You are a doctor?" Connery questioned the red-haired man.

"I am a surgeon; yes."

"That's what's wanted. Doctor—"

"My name is Sinclair. I am Douglas Sinclair, of Chicago."

Connery nodded. "I have heard of you." He turned then to Eaton. "Do you know where the gentleman is who belongs to Mr. Dorne's party?—Avery, I believe his name is."

"He is in the observation car," Eaton answered.

"Will you go and get him? The car-door is locked. The porter will let you in and out. Something serious has happened here—to Mr. Dorne. Get Mr. Avery, if you can, without alarming Mr. Dorne's daughter."

Eaton nodded understanding and followed the porter, who, taking the keys again from the conductor, let him out at the rear door of the car and reclosed the door behind him. Eaton went on into the observation car. As he passed the club compartment of this car, he sensed an atmosphere of disquiet which gave him first the feeling that some of these people must know already that there was something wrong farther forward; but this was explained when he heard some one say that the door of the car ahead was locked. Another asked Eaton how he had got through; he put the questioner off and went on into the observation-room. No suspicion of anything having occurred had as yet penetrated there.

"How long you've been!" Harriet Dorne remarked as he came near. "And how is it about the roof promenade?"

"Why, all right, I guess, Miss Dorne—after a little." Controlling himself to an appearance of casualness, he turned then to Avery: "By the way, can I see you a moment?"

Without alarming Harriet Dorne, he got Avery away and out of the car. A few passengers now were collected upon the platforms between this car and the next, who questioned and complained as Eaton, pushing by them with Avery, was admitted by the negro, who refused the others admittance.

"Is it something wrong with Mr. Dorne?" Donald Avery demanded as Eaton drew back to let Avery precede him into the open part of the car.

"So the conductor says."

Avery hurried forward toward the berth where Connery was standing beside the surgeon. Connery turned toward him.

"I sent for you, sir, because you are the companion of the man who had this berth."

Avery pushed past him, and leaped forward as he looked past the surgeon. "What has happened to Mr. Dorne?"

"You see him as we found him, sir." Connery stared down nervously beside him.

Avery leaned inside the curtains and recoiled. "He's dead!"

"The doctor hasn't made his examination yet; but, there seems no doubt he's dead." Connery was very pale but controlled.

"He's been murdered!"

"It looks so, Mr. Avery. Yes; if he's dead, he's certainly been murdered," Connery agreed. "This is Doctor Douglas Sinclair, a Chicago surgeon. I called him just now to make an examination; but since Mr. Dorne seems to have been dead for some time, I waited for you before moving the body. You can tell,"—Connery avoided mention of President Jarvis' name,—"tell any one who asks you, Mr. Avery, that you saw him just as he was found."

He looked down again at the form in the berth, and Avery's gaze followed his; then, abruptly, it turned away. Avery stood clinging to the curtain, his eyes darting from one to another of the three men.

"As he was found? When?" he demanded. "Who found him that way? When? How?"

"I found him so," Connery answered.

Avery said nothing more.

"Will you start your examination now, Dr. Sinclair," Connery suggested. "No—I'll ask you to wait a minute."

Noises were coming to them from the platforms at both ends of the car, and the doors were being tried and pounded on, as passengers attempted to pass through. Connery went to the rear, where the negro had been posted; then, repassing them, he went to the other end of the car. The noises ceased. "The Pullman conductor is forward, and the brakeman is back there now," he said, as he turned to them. "You will not be interrupted, Dr. Sinclair."

"What explanation did you give them?" Eaton asked.

"Why?" Connery returned.

"I was thinking of Miss Dorne."

"I told them nothing which could disturb her." Connery, as he spoke, pulled back the curtains, entirely exposing the berth.

The surgeon, before examining the man in the berth more closely, lifted the shades from the windows. Everything about the berth was in place, undisturbed; except for the mark of the savage blow on the side of the man's head, there was no evidence of anything unusual. The man's clothes were carefully and neatly hung on the hooks or in the little hammock; his glasses were in their case beside the pillow; his watch and purse were under the pillow; the window at his feet was still raised a crack to let in fresh air while he slept. Save for the marks upon the head, the man might yet be sleeping. It was self-evident that, whatever had been the motives of the attack, robbery was not one; whoever had struck had done no more than reach in and deliver his murderous blow; then he had gone on.

Connery shut the window.

As the surgeon carefully and deliberately pulled back the bedclothing and exposed the body of the man clothed in pajamas, the others watched him. Sinclair made first an examination of the head; completing this, he unbuttoned the pajamas upon the chest, loosened them at the waist and prepared to make his examination of the body.

"How long has he been dead?" Connery asked.

"He is not dead yet."

"You mean he is still dying?"

"I did not say so."

"You mean he is alive, then?"

"Life is still present," Sinclair answered guardedly. "Whether he will live or ever regain consciousness is another question."

"One you can't answer?"

"The blow, as you can see,"—Sinclair touched the man's face with his deft finger-tips,—"fell mostly on the cheek and temple. The cheekbone is fractured. He is in a complete state of coma; and there may be some fracture of the skull. Of course, there is some concussion of the brain."

Any inference to be drawn from this as to the seriousness of the injuries was plainly beyond Connery. "How long ago was he struck?" he asked.

"Some hours."

"You can't tell more than that?"

"Longer ago than five hours, certainly."

"Since four o'clock, then, rather than before?"

"Since midnight, certainly; and longer ago than five o'clock this morning."

"Could he have revived half an hour ago—say within the hour—enough to have pressed the button and rung the bell from his berth?"

Sinclair straightened and gazed at the conductor curiously. "No, certainly not," he replied. "That is completely impossible. Why did you ask?"

Connery avoided answer.

The doctor glanced down quickly at the form of the man in the berth; then again he confronted Connery. "Why did you ask that?" he persisted. "Did the bell from this berth ring recently?"

Connery shook his head, not in negation of the question, but in refusal to answer then. But Avery pushed forward. "What is that? What's that?" he demanded.

"Will you go on with your examination, Doctor?" Connery urged.

"You said the bell from this berth rang recently!" Avery accused Connery.

"I did not say that; he asked it," the conductor evaded.

"But is it true?"

"The pointer in the washroom, indicating a signal from this berth, was turned down a minute ago," Connery had to reply. "A few moments earlier, all pointers had been set in the position indicating no call."

"What!" Avery cried. "What was that?"

Connery repeated the statement.

"That was before you found the body?"

"That was why I went to the berth—yes," Connery replied; "that was before I found the body."

"Then you mean you did not find the body," Avery charged. "Some one, passing through this car a minute or so before you, must have found him!"

Connery attended without replying.

"And evidently that man dared not report it and could not wait longer to know whether Mr.—Mr. Dorne, was really dead; so he rang the bell!"

"Ought we keep Dr. Sinclair any longer from the examination, sir?" Connery now seized Avery's arm in appeal. "The first thing for us to know is whether Mr. Dorne is dying. Isn't—"

Connery checked himself; he had won his appeal. Eaton, standing quietly watchful, observed that Avery's eagerness to accuse now had been replaced by another interest which the conductor's words had recalled. Whether the man in the berth was to live or die—evidently that was momentously to affect Donald Avery one way or the other.

"Of course, by all means proceed with your examination, Doctor," Avery directed.

As Sinclair again bent over the body, Avery leaned over also; Eaton gazed down, and Connery—a little paler than before and with lips tightly set.

CHAPTER VII

"ISN'T THIS BASIL SANTOINE?"

The surgeon, having finished loosening the pajamas, pulled open and carefully removed the jacket part, leaving the upper part of the body of the man in the berth exposed. Conductor Connery turned to Avery.

"You have no objection to my taking a list of the articles in the berth?"

Avery seemed to oppose; then, apparently, he recognized that this was an obvious part of the conductor's duty. "None at all," he replied.

Connery gathered up the clothing, the glasses, the watch and purse, and laid them on the seat across the aisle. Sitting down, then, opposite them, he examined them and, taking everything from the pockets of the clothes, he began to catalogue them before Avery. In the coat he found only the card-case, which he noted without examining its contents, and in the trousers a pocket-knife and bunch of keys. He counted over the gold and banknotes in the purse and entered the amount upon his list.

"You know about what he had with him?" he asked.

"Very closely. That is correct. Nothing is missing," Avery answered.

The conductor opened the watch. "The crystal is missing."

Avery nodded. "Yes; it always—that is, it was missing yesterday."

Connery looked up at him, as though slightly puzzled by the manner of the reply; then, having finished his list, he rejoined the surgeon.

Sinclair was still bending over the naked torso. With Eaton's help, he had turned the body upon its back in order to look at its right side, which before had been hidden. It had been a strong, healthy body; Sinclair guessed its age at fifty. As a boy, the man might have been an athlete,—a college track-runner or oarsman,—and he had kept himself in condition through middle age. There was no mark or bruise upon the body, except that on the right side and just below the ribs there now showed a scar about an inch and a half long and of peculiar crescent shape. It was evidently a surgical scar and had completely healed.

Sinclair scrutinized this carefully and then looked up to Avery. "He was operated on recently?"

"About two years ago."

"For what?"

"It was some operation on the gall-bladder."

"Performed by Kuno Garrt?"

Avery hesitated. "I believe so."

He watched Sinclair more closely as he continued his examination; the surgeon had glanced quickly at the face on the pillow and seemed about to question Avery again; but instead he laid the pajama jacket over the body and drew up the sheet and blanket. Connery touched the surgeon on the arm. "What must be done, Doctor? And where and when do you want to do it?"

Sinclair, however, it appeared, had not yet finished his examination. "Will you pull down the window-curtains?" he directed.

As Connery, reaching across the body, complied, the surgeon took a matchbox from his pocket, and glancing about at the three others as though to select from them the one most likely to be an efficient aid, he handed it to Eaton. "Will you help me, please?"

"What is it you want done?"

"Strike a light and hold it as I direct—then draw it away slowly."

He lifted the partly closed eyelid from one of the eyes of the unconscious man and nodded to Eaton: "Hold the light in front of the pupil."

Eaton obeyed, drawing the light slowly away as Sinclair had directed, and the surgeon dropped the eyelid and exposed the other pupil.

"What's that for?" Avery now asked.

"I was trying to determine the seriousness of the injury to the brain. I was looking to see whether light could cause the pupil to contract."

"Could it?" Connery asked.

"No; there was no reaction."

Avery started to speak, checked himself—and then he said: "There could be no reaction, I believe, Dr. Sinclair."

"What do you mean?"

"His optic nerve is destroyed."

"Ah! He was blind?"

"Yes, he was blind," Avery admitted.

"Blind!" Sinclair ejaculated. "Blind, and operated upon within two years by Kuno Garrt!" Kuno Garrt operated only upon the all-rich and -powerful or upon the completely powerless and poor; the unconscious man in the berth could belong only to the first class of Garrt's clientele. The surgeon's gaze again searched the features in the berth; then it shifted to the men gathered about him in the aisle.

"Who did you say this was?" he demanded of Avery.

"I said his name was Nathan Dorne," Avery evaded.

"No, no!" Sinclair jerked out impatiently. "Isn't this—" He hesitated, and finished in a voice suddenly lowered: "Isn't this Basil Santoine?"

Avery, if he still wished to do so, found it impossible to deny.

"Basil Santoine!" Connery breathed.

To the conductor alone, among the four men standing by the berth, the name seemed to have come with the sharp shock of a surprise; with it had come an added sense of responsibility and horror over what had happened to the passenger who had been confided to his care, which made him whiten as he once more repeated the name to himself and stared down at the man in the berth.

Conductor Connery knew Basil Santoine only in the way that Santoine was known to great numbers of other people—that is, by name but not by sight. There was, however, a reason why the circumstances of Santoine's life had remained in the conductor's mind while he forgot or had not heeded the same sort of facts in regard to men who traveled much more often on trans-continental trains. Thus Connery, staring whitely at the form in the berth, recalled for instance Santoine's age; Santoine was fifty-one.

Basil Santoine at twenty-two had been graduated from Harvard, though blind. His connections,—the family was of well-to-do Southern stock,—his possession of enough money for his own support, made it possible for him to live idly if he wished; but Santoine had not chosen to make his blindness an excuse for doing this. He had disregarded too the thought of foreign travel as being useless for a man who had no eyes; and he had at once settled himself to his chosen profession, which was law. He had not found it easy to get a start in this; lawyers had shown no willingness to take into their offices a blind boy to whom the surroundings were unfamiliar and to whom everything must be read; and he had succeeded only after great effort in getting a place with a small and unimportant firm. Within a short time, well within two years, men had begun to recognize that in this struggling law-firm there was a powerful, clear, compelling mind. Santoine, a youth living in darkness, unable to see the men with whom he talked or the documents and books which must be read to him, was beginning to put the stamp of his personality on the firm's affairs. A year later, his name appeared with others of the firm; at twenty-eight, his was the leading name. He had begun to specialize long before that time, in corporation law; he married shortly after this. At thirty, the firm name represented to those who knew its particulars only one personality, the personality of Santoine; and at thirty-five—though his indifference to money was proverbial—he was many times a millionaire. But except among the small and powerful group of men who had learned to consult him, Santoine himself at that time was utterly unknown.

There are many such men in all countries,—more, perhaps, in America than anywhere else,—and in their anonymity they are like minds without physical personality; they advise only, and so they remain out of public view, behind the scenes. Now and then one receives publicity and reward by being sent to the Senate by the powers that move behind the screen, or being called to the President's cabinet. More often, the public knows little of them until they die and men are astonished by the size of the fortunes or of the seemingly baseless reputations which they leave. So Santoine—consulted continually by men concerned in great projects, immersed day and night in vast affairs, capable of living completely as he wished—had been, at the age of forty-six, great but not famous, powerful but not publicly known. At that time an event had occurred which had forced the blind man out unwillingly from his obscurity.

This event had been the murder of the great Western financier Matthew Latron. There had been nothing in this affair which had in any way shadowed dishonor upon Santoine. So much as in his role of a mind without personality Santoine ever fought, he had fought against Latron; but his fight had been not against the man but against methods. There had come then a time of uncertainty and unrest; public consciousness was in the process of awakening to the knowledge that strange things, approaching close to the likeness of what men call crime, had been being done under the unassuming name of business. Government investigation threatened many men, Latron among others; no precedent had yet been set for what this might mean; no one could foresee the end. Scandal—financial scandal—breathed more strongly against Latron than perhaps against any of the other Western men. He had been among their biggest; he had his enemies, of whom impersonally Santoine might have been counted one, and he had his friends, both in high places; he was a world figure. Then, all of a sudden, the man had been struck down—killed, because of some private quarrel, men whispered, by an obscure and till then unheard-of man.

The trembling wires and cables, which should have carried to the waiting world the expected news of Latron's conviction, carried instead the news of Latron's death; and disorder followed. The first public concern had been, of course, for the stocks and bonds of the great Latron properties; and Latron's bigness had seemed only further evidenced by the stanchness with which the Latron banks, the Latron railroads and mines and public utilities stood firm even against the shock of their builder's death. Assured of this, public interest had shifted to the trial, conviction and sentence of Latron's murderer; and it was during this trial that Santoine's name had become more publicly known. Not that the blind man was suspected of any knowledge—much less of any complicity—in the crime; the murder had been because of a purely private matter; but in the eager questioning into Latron's circumstances and surroundings previous to the crime, Santoine was summoned into court as a witness.

The drama of Santoine's examination had been of the sort the public—and therefore the newspapers—love. The blind man, led into the court, sitting sightless in the witness chair, revealing himself by his spoken, and even more by his withheld, replies as one of the unknown guiders of the destiny of the Continent and as counselor to the most powerful,—himself till then hardly heard of but plainly one of the nation's "uncrowned rulers,"—had caught the public sense. The fate of the murderer, the crime, even Latron himself, lost temporarily their interest in the public curiosity over the personality of Santoine. So, ever since, Santoine had been a man marked out; his goings and comings, beside what they might actually reveal of disagreements or settlements among the great, were the object of unfounded and often disturbing guesses and speculations; and particularly at this time when the circumstances of Warden's death had proclaimed dissensions among the powerful which they had hastened to deny, it was natural that Santoine's comings and goings should be as inconspicuous as possible.

It had been reported for some days that Santoine had come to Seattle directly after Warden's death; but when this was admitted, his associates had always been careful to add that Santoine, having been a close personal friend of Gabriel Warden, had come purely in a personal capacity, and the impression was given that Santoine had returned quietly some days before. The mere prolonging of his stay in the West was more than suggestive that affairs among the powerful were truly in such state as Warden had proclaimed; this attack upon Santoine, so similar to that which had slain Warden, and delivered within eleven days of Warden's death, must be of the gravest significance.

Connery stood overwhelmed for the moment with this fuller recognition of the seriousness of the disaster which had come upon this man entrusted to his charge; then he turned to the surgeon.

"Can you do anything for him here, Doctor?" he asked.

The surgeon glanced down the car. "That stateroom—is it occupied?"

"It's occupied by his daughter."

"We'll take him in there, then. Is the berth made?"

The conductor went to the rear of the car and brought the porter who had been stationed there, with the brakeman. He set the negro to making up the berth; and when it was finished, the four men lifted the inert figure of Basil Santoine, carried it into the drawing-room and laid it on its back upon the bed.

"I have my instruments," Sinclair said. "I'll get them; but before I decide to do anything, I ought to see his daughter. Since she is here, her consent is necessary before any operation on him."

The surgeon spoke to Avery. Eaton saw by Avery's start of recollection that Harriet Dorne's—or Harriet Santoine's—friend could not have been thinking of her at all during the recent moments. The chances of life or death of Basil Santoine evidently so greatly and directly affected Donald Avery that he had been absorbed in them to the point of forgetting all other interests than his own. Eaton's own thought had gone often to her. Had Connery in his directions said anything to the trainmen guarding the door or to the passengers on the platforms, that had frightened her with suspicions of what had happened here? When the first sense of something wrong spread back to the observation car, what word had reached her? Did she connect it with her father? Was she—the one most closely concerned—among those who had been on the rear platform seeking admittance? Was she standing there in the aisle of the next car waiting for confirmation of her dread? Or had no word reached her, and must the news of the attack upon her father come to her with all the shock of suddenness?

Eaton had been about to leave the car, where he now was plainly of no use, but these doubts checked him.

"Miss Santoine is in the observation car," Avery said. "I'll get her."

The tone was in some way false—Eaton could not tell exactly how. Avery started down the aisle.

"One moment, please, Mr. Avery!" said the conductor. "I'll ask you not to tell Miss Santoine before any other passengers that there has been an attack upon her father. Wait until you get her inside the door of this car."

"You yourself said nothing, then, that can have made her suspect it?" Eaton asked.

Connery shook his head; the conductor, in doubt and anxiety over exactly what action the situation called for,—unable, too, to communicate any hint of it to his superiors to the West because of the wires being down,—clearly had resolved to keep the attack upon Santoine secret for the time. "I said nothing definite even to the trainmen," he replied; "and I want you gentlemen to promise me before you leave this car that you will say nothing until I give you leave."

His eyes shifted from the face of one to another, until he had assured himself that all agreed. As Avery left the car, Eaton found a seat in one of the end sections near the drawing-room. Sinclair and the conductor had returned to Santoine. The porter was unmaking the berth in the next section which Santoine had occupied, having been told to do so by Connery; the negro bundled together the linen and carried it to the cupboard at the further end of the car; he folded the blankets and put them in the upper berth; he took out the partitions and laid them on top of the blankets. Eaton stared out the window at the bank of snow. He did not know whether to ask to leave the car, or whether he ought to remain; and he would have gone except for recollection of Harriet Santoine. He had heard the rear door of the car open and close some moments before, so he knew that she must be in the car and that, in the passage at that end, Avery must be telling her about her father. Then the curtain at the end of the car was pushed further aside, and Harriet Santoine came in.

She was very pale, but quite controlled, as Eaton knew she would be. She looked at Eaton, but did not speak as she passed; she went directly to the door of the drawing-room, opened it and went in, followed by Avery. The door closed, and for a moment Eaton could hear voices inside the room—Harriet Santoine's, Sinclair's, Connery's. The conductor then came to the door of the drawing-room and sent the porter for water and clean linen; Eaton heard the rip of linen being torn, and the car became filled with the smell of antiseptics.

Donald Avery came out of the drawing-room and dropped into the seat across from Eaton. He seemed deeply thoughtful—so deeply, indeed, as to be almost unaware of Eaton's presence. And Eaton, observing him, again had the sense that Avery's absorption was completely in consequences to himself of what was going on behind the door—in how Basil Santoine's death or continued existence would affect the fortunes of Donald Avery.

"Is he going to operate?" Eaton asked.

"Operate? Yes; he's doing it," Avery replied shortly.

"And Miss Santoine?"

"She's helping—handing instruments and so on."

Avery could not have replied, as he did, if the strain this period must impose upon Harriet Santoine had been much in his mind. Eaton turned from him and asked nothing more. A long time passed—how long, Eaton could not have told; he noted only that during it the shadows on the snowbank outside the window appreciably changed their position. Once during this time, the door of the drawing-room was briefly opened, while Connery handed something out to the porter, and the smell of the antiseptics grew suddenly stronger; and Eaton could see behind Connery the surgeon, coatless and with shirt-sleeves rolled up, bending over the figure on the bed. Finally the door opened again, and Harriet Santoine came out, paler than before, and now not quite so steady.

Eaton rose as she approached them; and Avery leaped up, all concern and sympathy for her immediately she appeared. He met her in the aisle and took her hand.

"Was it successful, dear?" Avery asked.

She shut her eyes before she answered, and stood holding to the back of a seat; then she opened her eyes, saw Eaton and recognized him and sat down in the seat where Avery had been sitting.

"Dr. Sinclair says we will know in four or five days," she replied to Avery; she turned then directly to Eaton. "He thought there probably was a clot under the skull, and he operated to find it and relieve it. There was one, and we have done all we can; now we may only wait. Dr. Sinclair has appointed himself nurse; he says I can help him, but not just yet. I thought you would like to know."

"Thank you; I did want to know," Eaton acknowledged. He moved away from them, and sat down in one of the seats further down the car. Connery came out from the drawing-room, went first to one end of the car, then to the other; and returning with the Pullman conductor, began to oversee the transfer of the baggage of all other passengers than the Santoine party to vacant sections in the forward sleepers. People began to pass through the aisle; evidently the car doors had been unlocked. Eaton got up and left the car, finding at the door a porter from one of the other cars stationed to warn people not to linger or speak or make other noises in going through the car where Santoine was.

As the door was closing behind Eaton, a sound came to his ears from the car he just had left—a young girl suddenly crying in abandon. Harriet Santoine, he understood, must have broken down for the moment, after the strain of the operation; and Eaton halted as though to turn back, feeling the blood drive suddenly upon his heart. Then, recollecting that he had no right to go to her, he went on.

CHAPTER VIII

SUSPICION FASTENS ON EATON

As he entered his own car, Eaton halted; that part of the train had taken on its usual look and manner, or as near so, it seemed, as the stoppage in the snow left possible. Knowing what he did, Eaton stared at first with astonishment; and the irrational thought came to him that the people before him were acting. Then he realized that they were almost as usual because they did not know what had happened; the fact that Basil Santoine had been attacked—or that he was on the train—still had been carefully kept secret by the spreading of some other explanation of the trouble in the car behind. So now, in their section, Amy and Constance were reading and knitting; their parents had immersed themselves in double solitaire; the Englishman looked out the window at the snow with no different expression than that with which he would have surveyed a landscape they might have been passing. Sinclair's section, of course, remained empty; and a porter came and transferred the surgeon's handbag and overcoat to the car behind in which he was caring for Santoine.

Eaton found his car better filled than it had been before, for the people shifted from the car behind had been scattered through the train. He felt a hand on his arm as he started to go to his seat, and turned and faced Connery.

"If you must say anything, say it was appendicitis," the conductor warned when he had brought Eaton back to the vestibule. "Mr. Dorne—if a name is given, it is that—was suddenly seized with a recurrence of an attack of appendicitis from which he had been suffering. An immediate operation was required to save him; that was what Dr. Sinclair did."

Eaton reaffirmed his agreement to give no information. He learned by the conversation of the passengers that Connery's version of what had happened had been easily received; some one, they said, had been taken suddenly and seriously ill upon the train. Their speculation, after some argument, had pitched on the right person; it was the tall, distinguished-looking man in the last car who wore glasses. At noon, food was carried into the Santoine car.

Keeping himself to his section, Eaton watched the car and outside the window for signs of what investigation Connery and Avery were making. What already was known had made it perfectly clear that whoever had attacked Santoine must still be upon the train; for no one could have escaped through the snow. No one could now escape. Avery and Connery and whoever else was making investigation with them evidently were not letting any one know that an investigation was being made. A number of times Eaton saw Connery and the Pullman conductor pass through the aisles. Eaton went to lunch; on his way back from the diner, he saw the conductors with papers in their hands questioning a passenger. They evidently were starting systematically through the cars, examining each person; they were making the plea of necessity of a report to the railroad offices of names and addresses of all held up by the stoppage of the train. As Eaton halted at his section, the two conductors finished with the man from the rear who had been installed in Section One, and they crossed to the Englishman opposite. Eaton heard them explain the need of making a report and heard the Englishman's answer, with his name, his address and particulars as to who he was, where he was coming from and whither he was going.

Eaton started on toward the rear of the train.

"A moment, sir!" Connery called.

Eaton halted. The conductors confronted him.

"Your name, sir?" Connery asked.

"Philip D. Eaton."

Connery wrote down the answer. "Your address?"

"I—have no address."

"You mean you don't want to give it?"

"No, I have none. I was going to a hotel in Chicago—which one I hadn't decided yet."

"Where are you coming from?"

"From Asia."

"That's hardly an address, Mr. Eaton!"

"I can give you no address abroad. I had no fixed address there. I was traveling most of the time. You could not reach me or place me by means of any city or hotel there. I arrived in Seattle by the Asiatic steamer and took this train."

"Ah! you came on the Tamba Maru."

Connery made note of this, as he had made note of all the other questions and answers. Then he said something to the Pullman conductor, who replied in the same low tone; what they said was not audible to Eaton.

"You can tell us at least where your family is, Mr. Eaton," Connery suggested.

"I have no family."

"Friends, then?"

"I—I have no friends."

"What?"

"I say that I can refer you to no friends."

"Nowhere?"

"Nowhere."

Connery pondered for several moments. "The Mr. Hillward—Lawrence Hillward, to whom the telegram was addressed which you claimed this morning, your associate who was to have taken this train with you—will you give me his address?"

"I thought you had decided the telegram was not meant for me."

"I am asking you a question, Mr. Eaton—not making explanations. It isn't impossible there should be two Lawrence Hillwards."

"I don't know Hillward's address."

"Give me the address, then, of the man who sent the telegram."

"I am unable to do that, either."

Connery spoke again to the Pullman conductor, and they conversed inaudibly for a minute. "That is all, then," Connery said finally.

He signed his name to the sheet on which he had written Eaton's answers, and handed it to the Pullman conductor, who also signed it and returned it to him; then they went on to the passenger now occupying Section Four, without making any further comment.

Eaton abandoned his idea of going to the rear of the train; he sat down, picked up his magazine and tried to read; but after an instant, he leaned forward and looked at himself in the little mirror between the windows. It reassured him to find that he looked entirely normal; he had been afraid that during the questioning he might have turned pale, and his paleness—taken in connection with his inability to answer the questions—might have seriously directed the suspicions of the conductors toward him. The others in the car, who might have overheard his refusal to reply to the questions, would be regarding him only curiously, since they did not know the real reasons for the examination. But the conductors—what did they think?

Already, Eaton reflected, before the finding of the senseless form of Basil Santoine, there had occurred the disagreeable incident of the telegram to attract unfavorable attention to him. On the other hand, might not the questioning of him have been purely formal? Connery certainly had treated him, at the time of the discovery of Santoine, as one not of the class to be suspected of being the assailant of Santoine. Avery, to be sure, had been uglier, more excited and hostile; but Harriet Santoine again had treated him trustfully and frankly as one with whom thought of connection with the attack upon her father was impossible. Eaton told himself that there should be no danger to himself from this inquiry, directed against no one, but including comprehensively every one on the train.

As Eaton pretended to read, he could hear behind him the low voices of the conductors, which grew fainter and fainter as they moved further away, section by section, down the car. Finally, when the conductors had left the car, he put his magazine away and went into the men's compartment to smoke and calm his nerves. His return to America had passed the bounds of recklessness; and what a situation he would now be in if his actions brought even serious suspicions against him! He finished his first cigar and was debating whether to light another, when he heard voices outside the car, and opening the window and looking out, he saw Connery and the brakeman struggling through the snow and making, apparently, some search. They had come from the front of the train and had passed under his window only an instant before, scrutinizing the snowbank beside the car carefully and looking under the car—the brakeman even had crawled under it; now they went on. Eaton closed the window and lighted his second cigar. Presently Connery passed the door of the compartment carrying something loosely wrapped in a newspaper in his hands. Eaton finished his cigar and went back to his seat in the car.

As he glanced at the seat where he had left the magazine and his locked traveling-bag, he saw that the bag was no longer there. It stood now between the two seats on the floor, and picking it up and looking at it, he found it unfastened and with marks about the lock which told plainly that it had been forced.

His quick glance around at the other passengers, which showed him that his discovery of this had not been noticed, showed also that they had not seen the bag opened. They would have been watching him if they had; clearly the bag had been carried out of the car during his absence, and later had been brought back. He set it on the floor between his knees and checked over its contents. Nothing had been taken, so far as he could tell; for the bag had contained only clothing, the Chinese dictionary and the box of cigars, and these all apparently were still there. He had laid out the things on the seat across from him while checking them up, and now he began to put them back in the bag. Suddenly he noticed that one of his socks was missing; what had been eleven pairs was now only ten pairs and one odd sock.

The disappearance of a single sock was so strange, so bizarre, so perplexing that—unless it was accidental—he could not account for it at all. No one opens a man's bag and steals one sock, and he was quite sure there had been eleven complete pairs there earlier in the day. Certainly then, it had been accidental: the bag had been opened, its contents taken out and examined, and in putting them back, one sock had been dropped unnoticed. The absence of the sock, then, meant no more than that the contents of the bag had been thoroughly investigated. By whom? By the man against whom the telegram directed to Lawrence Hillward had warned Eaton?

Ever since his receipt of the telegram, Eaton—as he passed through the train in going to and from the diner or for other reasons—had been trying covertly to determine which, if any one, among the passengers was the "one" who, the telegram had warned him, was "following" him. For at first he had interpreted it to mean that one of "them" whom he had to fear must be on the train. Later he had felt certain that this could not be the case, for otherwise any one of "them" who knew him would have spoken by this time. He had watched particularly for a time the man who had claimed the telegram and given the name of Hillward; but the only conclusion he had been able to reach was that the man's name might be Hillward, and that coincidence—strange as such a thing seemed—might have put aboard the train a person by this name. Now his suspicions that one of "them" must be aboard the train returned.

The bag certainly had not been carried out the forward door of the car, or he would have seen it from the compartment at that end of the car where he had sat smoking. As he tried to recall who had passed the door of the compartment, he remembered no one except trainmen. The bag, therefore, had been carried out the rear door, and the man who had opened it, if a passenger, must still be in the rear part of the train.

Eaton, refilling his cigar-case to give his action a look of casualness, got up and went toward the rear of the train. A porter was still posted at the door of the Santoine car, who warned him to be quiet in passing through. The car, he found, was entirely empty; the door to the drawing-room where Santoine lay was closed. Two berths near the farther end of the car had been made up, no doubt for the surgeon and Harriet Santoine to rest there during the intervals of their watching; but the curtains of these berths were folded back, showing both of them to be empty, though one apparently had been occupied. Was Harriet Santoine with her father?

He went on into the observation-car. The card-room was filled with players, and he stood an instant at the door looking them over, but "Hillward" was not among them, and he saw no one whom he felt could possibly be one of "them." In the observation-room, the case was the same; a few men and women passengers here were reading or talking. Glancing on past them through the glass door at the end of the car, he saw Harriet Santoine standing alone on the observation platform. The girl did not see him; her back was toward the car. As he went out onto the platform and the sound of the closing door came to her, she turned to meet him.

She looked white and tired, and faint gray shadows underneath her eyes showed where dark circles were beginning to form.

"I am supposed to be resting," she explained quietly, accepting him as one who had the right to ask.

"Have you been watching all day?"

"With Dr. Sinclair, yes. Dr. Sinclair is going to take half the night watch, and I am going to take the other half. That is why I am supposed to be lying down now to get ready for it; but I could not sleep."

"How is your father?"

"Just the same; there may be no change, Dr. Sinclair says, for days. It seems all so sudden and so—terrible, Mr. Eaton. You can hardly appreciate how we feel about it without knowing Father. He was so good, so strong, so brave, so independent! And at the same time so—so dependent upon those around him, because of his blindness! He started out so handicapped, and he has accomplished so much, and—and it is so unjust that there should have been such an attack upon him."

Eaton, leaning against the rail beside her and glancing at her, saw that her lashes were wet, and his eyes dropped as they caught hers.

"They have been investigating the attack?"

"Yes; Donald—Mr. Avery, you know—and the conductor have been working on it all day."

"What have they learned?"

"Not much, I think; at least not much that they have told me. They have been questioning the porter."

"The porter?"

"Oh, I don't mean that they think the porter had anything to do with it; but the bell rang, you know."

"The bell?"

"The bell from Father's berth. I thought you knew. It rang some time before Father was found—some few minutes before; the porter did not hear it, but the pointer was turned down. They have tested it, and it cannot be jarred down or turned in any way except by means of the bell."

Eaton looked away from her, then back again rather strangely.

"I would not attach too much importance to the bell," he said.

"Father could not have rung it; Dr. Sinclair says that is impossible. So its being rung shows that some one was at the berth, some one must have seen Father lying there and—and rung the bell, but did not tell any one about Father. That could hardly have been an innocent person, Mr. Eaton."

"Or a guilty one, Miss Santoine, or he would not have rung the bell at all."

"I don't know—I don't understand all it might mean. I have tried not to think about anything but Father."

"Is that all they have learned?"

"No; they have found the weapon."

"The weapon with which your father was struck?"

"Yes; the man who did it seems not to have realized that the train was stopped—or at least that it would be stopped for so long—and he threw it off the train, thinking, I suppose, we should be miles away from there by morning. But the train didn't move, and the snow didn't cover it up, and it was found lying against the snowbank this afternoon. It corresponds, Dr. Sinclair says, with Father's injuries."

"What was it?"

"It seems to have been a bar of metal—of steel, they said, I think, Mr. Eaton—wrapped in a man's black sock."

"A sock!" Eaton's voice sounded strange to himself; he felt that the blood had left his cheeks, leaving him pale, and that the girl must notice it. "A man's sock!"

Then he saw that she had not noticed, for she had not been looking at him.

"It could be carried in that way through the sleepers, you know, without attracting attention," she observed.

Eaton had controlled himself. "A sock!" he said again, reflectively.

He felt suddenly a rough tap upon his shoulder, and turning, he saw that Donald Avery had come out upon the platform and was standing beside him; and behind Avery, he saw Conductor Connery. There was no one else on the platform.

"Will you tell me, Mr. Eaton—or whatever else your name may be—what it is that you have been asking Miss Santoine?" Avery demanded harshly.

Eaton felt his blood surge at the tone. Harriet Santoine had turned, and sensing the strangeness of Avery's manner, she whitened. "What is it, Don?" she cried. "What is the matter? Is something wrong with Father?"

"No, dear; no! Harry, what has this man been saying to you?"

"Mr. Eaton?" Her gaze went wonderingly from Avery to Eaton and back again. "Why—why, Don! He has only been asking me what we had found out about the attack on Father!"

"And you told him?" Avery swung toward Eaton. "You dog!" he mouthed. "Harriet, he asked you that because he needed to know—he had to know! He had to know how much we had found out, how near we were getting to him! Harry, this is the man that did it!"

Eaton's fists clenched; but suddenly, recollecting, he checked himself. Harriet, not yet comprehending, stood staring at the two; then Eaton saw the blood rush to her face and dye forehead and cheek and neck as she understood.

"Not here, Mr. Avery; not here!" Conductor Connery had stepped forward, glancing back into the car to assure himself the disturbance on the platform had not attracted the attention of the passengers in the observation-room. He put his hand on Eaton's arm. "Come with me, sir," he commanded.

Eaton thought anxiously for a moment. He looked to Harriet Santoine as though about to say something to her, but he did not speak; instead, he quietly followed the conductor. As they passed through the observation-car into the car ahead, he heard the footsteps of Harriet Santoine and Avery close behind them.

CHAPTER IX

QUESTIONS

Connery pulled aside the curtain of the washroom at the end of the Santoine car—the end furthest from the drawing-room where Santoine lay.

"Step in here, sir," he directed. "Sit down, if you want. We're far enough from the drawing-room not to disturb Mr. Santoine."

Eaton, seating himself in the corner of the leather seat built against two walls of the room, and looking up, saw that Avery had come into the room with them. The girl followed. With her entrance into the room came to him—not any sound from her or anything which he could describe to himself as either audible or visual—but a strange sensation which exhausted his breath and stopped his pulse for a beat. To be accused—even to be suspected—of the crime against Santoine was to have attention brought to him which—with his unsatisfactory account of himself—threatened ugly complications. Yet, at this moment of realization, that did not fill his mind. Whether his long dwelling close to death had numbed him to his own danger, however much more immediate it had become, he could not know; probably he had prepared himself so thoroughly, had inured himself so to expect arrest and imminent destruction, that now his finding himself confronted with accusers in itself failed to stir new sensation; but till this day, he had never imagined or been able to prepare himself for accusation before one like Harriet Santoine; so, for a moment, thought solely of himself was a subcurrent. Of his conscious feelings, the terror that she would be brought to believe with the others that he had struck the blow against her father was the most poignant.

Harriet Santoine was not looking at him; but as she stood by the door, she was gazing intently at Avery; and she spoke first:

"I don't believe it, Don!"

Eaton felt the warm blood flooding his face and his heart throb with gratitude toward her.

"You don't believe it because you don't understand yet, dear," Avery declared. "We are going to make you believe it by proving to you it is true."

Avery pulled forward one of the leather chairs for her to seat herself and set another for himself facing Eaton. Eaton, gazing across steadily at Avery, was chilled and terrified as he now fully realized for the first time the element which Avery's presence added. What the relations were between Harriet Santoine and Avery he did not know, but clearly they were very close; and it was equally clear that Avery had noticed and disliked the growing friendship between her and Eaton. Eaton sensed now with a certainty that left no doubt in his own mind that as he himself had realized only a moment before that his strongest feeling was the desire to clear himself before Harriet Santoine, so Avery now was realizing that—since some one on the train had certainly made the attack on Santoine—he hoped he could prove before her that that person was Eaton.

"Why did you ring the bell in Mr. Santoine's berth?" Avery directed the attack upon him suddenly.

"To call help," Eaton answered.

Question and answer, Eaton realized, had made some effect upon Harriet Santoine, as he did not doubt Avery intended they should; yet he could not look toward her to learn exactly what this effect was but kept his eyes on Avery.

"You had known, then, that he needed help?"

"I knew it—saw it then, of course."

"When?"

"When I found him."

"'Found' him?"

"Yes."

"When was that?"

"When I went forward to look for the conductor to ask him about taking a walk on the roof of the cars."

"You found him then—that way, the way he was?"

"That way? Yes."

"How?"

"How?" Eaton iterated.

"Yes; how, Mr. Eaton, or Hillward, or whatever your name is? How did you find him? The curtains were open, perhaps; you saw him as you went by, eh?"

Eaton shook his head. "No; the curtains weren't open; they were closed."

"Then why did you look in?"

"I saw his hand in the aisle."

"Go on."

"When I came back it didn't look right to me; its position had not been changed at all, and it hadn't looked right to me before. So I stopped and touched it, and I found that it was cold."

"Then you looked into the berth?"

"Yes."

"And having looked in and seen Mr. Santoine injured and lying as he was, you did not call any one, you did not bring help—you merely leaned across him and pushed the bell and went on quickly out of the car before any one could see you?"

"Yes; but I waited on the platform of the next car to see that help did come; and the conductor passed me, and I knew that he and the porter must find Mr. Santoine as they did."

"Do you expect us to believe that very peculiar action of yours was the act of an innocent man?"

"If I had been guilty of the attack on Mr. Santoine, I'd not have stopped or looked into the berth at all."

"If you are innocent, you had, of course, some reason for acting as you did. Will you explain what it was?"

"No—I cannot explain."

With a look almost of triumph Avery turned to Harriet Santoine, and Eaton felt his flesh grow warm with gratitude again as he saw her meet Avery's look with no appearance of being convinced.

"Mr. Eaton spoke to me about that," she said quietly.

"You mean he told you he was the one who rang the bell?"

"No; he told me we must not attach too much importance to the ringing of the bell in inquiring into the attack on Father."

Avery smiled grimly. "He did, did he? Don't you see that that only shows more surely that he did not want the ringing of the bell investigated because it would lead us to himself? He did not happen to tell you, did he, that the kind and size of socks he wears and carries in his traveling-bag are very nearly the same as the black sock in which the bar was wrapped with which your father was struck?"

"It was you, then, who took the sock from my bag?" Eaton demanded.

"It was the conductor, and I can assure you, Mr. Eaton-Hillward, that we are preserving it very carefully along with the one which was found in the snow."

"But the socks were not exactly the same, were they?" Harriet Santoine asked.

Avery made a vexed gesture, and turned to Connery. "Tell her the rest of it," he directed.

Connery, who had remained standing back of the two chairs, moved slightly forward. His responsibility in connection with the crime that had been carried out on his train had weighed heavily on the conductor; he was worn and nervous.

"Where shall I begin?" he asked of Avery; he was looking not at the girl but at Eaton.

"At the beginning," Avery directed.

"Mr. Eaton, when you came to this train, the gateman at Seattle called my attention to you," Connery began. "I didn't attach enough importance, I see now, to what he said; I ought to have watched you closer and from the first. Old Sammy has recognized men with criminal records time and time again. He's got seven rewards out of it."

Eaton felt his pulses close with a shock. "He recognized me?" he asked quietly.

"No, he didn't; he couldn't place you," Connery granted. "He couldn't tell whether you were somebody that was 'wanted' or some one well known—some one famous, maybe; but I ought to have kept my eye on you because of that, from the very start. Now this morning you claim a telegram meant for another man—a man named Hillward, on this train, who seems to be all right—that is, by his answers and his account of himself he seems to be exactly what he claims to be."

"Did he read the telegram to you?" Eaton asked. "It was in code. If it was meant for him, he ought to be able to read it."

"No, he didn't. Will you?"

Eaton halted while he recalled the exact wording of the message. "No."

Connery also paused.

"Is this all you have against me?" Eaton asked.

"No; it's not. Mr. Avery's already told you the next thing, and you've admitted it. But we'd already been able by questioning the porter of this car and the ones in front and back of it to narrow down the time of the ringing of Mr. Santoine's bell not to quarter-hours but to minutes; and to find out that during those few minutes you were the only one who passed through the car. So there's no use of my going into that." Connery paused and looked to Avery and the girl. "You'll wait a minute, Mr. Avery; and you, Miss Santoine. I won't be long."

He left the washroom, and the sound of the closing of a door which came to Eaton a half-minute later told that he had gone out the front end of the car.

As the three sat waiting in the washroom, no one spoke. Eaton, looking past Avery, gazed out the window at the bank of snow. Eaton understood fully that the manner in which the evidence against him was being presented to him was not with any expectation that he could defend himself; Avery and Connery were obviously too certain of their conclusion for that; rather, as it was being given thus under Avery's direction, it was for the effect upon Harriet Santoine and to convince her fully. But Eaton had understood this from the first. It was for this reason he had not attempted to deny having rung Santoine's bell, realizing that if he denied it and it afterwards was proved, he would appear in a worse light than by his inability to account for or assign a reason for his act. And he had proved right in this; for the girl had not been convinced. So now he comprehended that something far more convincing and more important was to come; but what that could be, he could not guess.

As he glanced at her, he saw her sitting with hands clasped in her lap, pale, and merely waiting. Avery, as though impatient, had got up and gone to the door, where he could look out into the passage. From time to time people had passed through the car, but no one had stopped at the washroom door or looked in; the voices in the washroom had not been raised, and even if what was going on there could have attracted momentary attention, the instructions to pass quickly through the car would have prevented any one from stopping to gratify his curiosity. Eaton's heart-beat quickened as, listening, he heard the car door open and close again and footsteps, coming to them along the aisle, which he recognized as those of Conductor Connery and some one else with him.

Avery returned to his seat, as the conductor appeared in the door of the washroom followed by the Englishman from Eaton's car, Henry Standish. Connery carried the sheet on which he had written the questions he had asked Eaton, and Eaton's answers.

"What name were you using, Mr. Eaton, when you came from Asia to the United States?" the conductor demanded.

Eaton reflected. "My own," he said. "Philip D. Eaton."

Connery brought the paper nearer to the light of the window, running his finger down it till he found the note he wanted. "When I asked this afternoon where you came from in Asia, Mr. Eaton, you answered me something like this: You said you could give me no address abroad; you had been traveling most of the time; you could not be placed by inquiring at any city or hotel; you came to Seattle by the Asiatic steamer and took this train. That was your reply, was it not?"

"Yes," Eaton answered.

"The 'Asiatic steamer'—the Tamba Maru that was, Mr. Eaton."

Eaton looked up quickly and was about to speak; but from Connery his gaze shifted swiftly to the Englishman, and checking himself, he said nothing.

"Mr. Standish,"—Connery faced the Englishman,—"you came from Yokohama to Seattle on the Tamba Maru, didn't you?"

"I did, yes."

"Do you remember this Mr. Eaton among the passengers?"

"No."

"Do you know he was not among the passengers?"

"Yes, I do."

"How do you know?"

The Englishman took a folded paper from his pocket, opened it and handed it to the conductor. Connery, taking it, held it out to Eaton.

"Here, Mr. Eaton," he said, "is the printed passenger-list of the people aboard the Tamba Maru prepared after leaving Yokohama for distribution among the passengers. It's unquestionably correct. Will you point out your name on it?"

Eaton made no move to take the paper; and after holding it long enough to give him full opportunity, Connery handed it back to the Englishman.

"That's all, Mr. Standish," he said.

Eaton sat silent as the Englishman, after staring curiously around at them with his bulging, interested eyes, left the washroom.

"Now, Mr. Eaton," Connery said, as the sound of Standish's steps became inaudible, "either you were not on the Tamba Maru or you were on it under some other name than Eaton. Which was it?"

"I never said I was on the Tamba Maru," Eaton returned steadily. "I said I came from Asia by steamer. You yourself supplied the name Tamba Maru."

"In case of questioning like that, Mr. Eaton, it makes no difference whether you said it or I supplied it in your hearing. If you didn't correct me, it was because you wanted me to get a wrong impression about you. You can take notice that the only definite fact about you put down on this paper has proved to be incorrect. You weren't on the Tamba Maru, were you?"

"No, I was not."

"Why didn't you say so while Mr. Standish was here?"

"I didn't know how far you had taken him into your confidence in this matter."

"You did come from Asia, though, as your railroad ticket seemed to show?"

"Yes."

"From where?"

Eaton did not answer.

"From Yokohama?"

"The last port we stopped at before sailing for Seattle was Yokohama—yes."

Connery reflected. "You had been in Seattle, then, at least five days; for the last steamer you could have come on docked five days before the Tamba Maru."

"You assume that; I do not tell you so."

"I assume it because it must be so. You'd been in Seattle—or at least you had been in America—for not less than five days. In fact, Mr. Eaton, you had been on this side of the water for as many as eleven days, had you not?"

"Eleven days?" Eaton repeated.

"Yes; for it was just eleven days before this train left Seattle that you came to the house of Mr. Gabriel Warden and waited there for him till he was brought home dead!"

Eaton, sitting forward a little, looked up at the conductor; his glance caught Avery's an instant; he gazed then to Harriet Santoine. At the charge, she had started; but Avery had not. The identification, therefore, was Connery's, or had been agreed upon by Connery and Avery between them; suggestion of it had not come from the Santoines. And Connery had made the charge without being certain of it; he was watching the effect, Eaton now realized, to see if what he had accused was correct.

"What do you mean by that?" Eaton returned.

"What I said. You came to see Gabriel Warden in Seattle eleven days ago," Connery reasserted. "You are the man who waited in his house that night and whom every one has been looking for since!"

"Well?" inquired Eaton.

"Isn't that so?" Connery demanded. "Or do you want to deny that too and have it proved on you later?"

Again for a moment Eaton sat silent. "No," he decided, "I do not deny that."

"Then you are the man who was at Warden's the night he was murdered?"

"Yes," said Eaton, "I was there that evening. I was the one who came there by appointment and waited till after Mr. Warden was brought home dead."

"So you admit that?" Connery gloated; but he could not keep from Eaton a sense that, by Eaton's admission of the fact, Connery had been disappointed. Avery too plainly had expected Eaton to deny it; the identification of Eaton with the man who had waited at Warden's was less a triumph to Avery, now that it was confessed. Indeed, Eaton's heart leaped with quick gratitude as he now met Harriet Santoine's eyes and as he heard her turning it into a fact in his favor.

"All you have brought against Mr. Eaton is that he has been indefinite in his replies to your questions or has refused answers; isn't that all, Don?" she said. "So if Mr. Eaton is the one who had the appointment with Mr. Warden that night, does not that explain his silence?"

"Explain it?" Avery demanded. "How?"

"We have Mr. Warden's word that Mr. Eaton came that night because he was in trouble—he had been outrageously wronged, Don. He was in danger. Because of that danger, undoubtedly, he has not made himself known since. May not that be the only reason he has avoided answering your questions now?"

"No!" Avery jerked out shortly.

Eaton's heart, from pulsating fast with Harriet Santoine's attempt at his defense, now constricted with a sudden increase of his terror and anxiety.

"All right, Mr. Eaton!" Connery now returned to his charge. "You are that man. So besides whatever else that means, you'd been in Seattle eleven days and yet you were the last person to get aboard this train, which left a full hour after its usual starting time. Who were you waiting to see get on the train before you yourself took it?"

Eaton wet his lips. To what was Connery working up? The probability, now rapidly becoming certainty, that in addition to the recognition of him as the man who had waited at Warden's—which fact any one at any time might have charged—Connery knew something else which the conductor could not have been expected to know—this dismayed Eaton the more by its indefiniteness. And he saw, as his gaze shifted to Avery, that Avery knew this thing also. All that had gone before had been only preliminary, then; they had been leading up step by step to the circumstance which had finally condemned him in their eyes and was to condemn him in the eyes of Harriet Santoine.

She, he saw, had also sensed the feeling that something else more definite and conclusive was coming. She had paled after the flush in which she had spoken in Eaton's defense, and her hands in her lap were clenched so tightly that the knuckles showed only as spots of white.

Eaton controlled himself to keep his voice steady.

"What do you mean by that question?" he asked.

"I mean that—however innocent or guilty may be the chance of your being at Mr. Warden's the night he was killed—you'll have a hard time proving that you did not wait and watch and take this train because Basil Santoine had taken it; and that you were not following him. Do you deny it?"

Eaton was silent.

"You asked the Pullman conductor for a Section Three after hearing him assign Mr. Santoine to Section Three in this car. Do you deny that you did this so as not to be put in the same car with him?"

Eaton, in his uncertainty, still said nothing. Connery, bringing the paper in his hand nearer to the window again, glanced down once more at the statement Eaton had made. "I asked you who you knew in Chicago," he said, "and you answered 'No one.' That was your reply, was it not?"

"Yes."

"You still make the same statement?"

"Yes."

"You know no one in Chicago?"

"No one," Eaton repeated.

"And certainly no one there knows you well enough to follow your movements in relation to Mr. Santoine. That's a necessary assumption from the fact that you know no one at all there."

The conductor pulled a telegram from his pocket and handed it to Avery, who, evidently having already seen it, passed it on to Harriet Santoine. She took it, staring at it mechanically and vacantly; then suddenly she shivered, and the yellow paper which she had read slipped from her hand and fluttered to the floor. Connery stooped and picked it up and handed it toward Eaton.

"This is yours," he said.

Eaton had sensed already what the nature of the message must be, though as the conductor held it out to him he could read only his name at the top of the sheet and did not know yet what the actual wording was below. Acceptance of it must mean arrest, indictment for the crime against Basil Santoine; and that, whether or not he later was acquitted, must destroy him; but denial of the message now would be hopeless.

"It is yours, isn't it?" Connery urged.

"Yes; it's mine," Eaton admitted; and to make his acceptance definite, he took the paper from Connery. As he looked dully down at it, he read:

He is on your train under the name of Dorne.

The message was not signed.

Connery touched him on the shoulder. "Come with me, Mr. Eaton."

Eaton got up slowly and mechanically and followed the conductor. At the door he halted and looked back; Harriet Santoine was not looking; her face was covered with her hands; Eaton hesitated; then he went on. Connery threw open the door of the compartment next to the washroom and corresponding to the drawing-room at the other end of the car, but smaller.

"You'll do well enough in here." He looked over Eaton deliberately. "Judging from your manner, I suppose there's not much use expecting you to answer anything more about yourself—either in relation to the Warden murder or this?"

"No," said Eaton, "there is not."

"You prefer to make us find out anything more?"

Eaton made no answer.

"All right," Connery concluded. "But if you change your mind for the better, or if you want anything bad enough to send for me, ring for the porter and he'll get me."

He closed the door upon Eaton and locked it. As Eaton stood staring at the floor, he could hear through the metal partition of the washroom the nervous, almost hysterical weeping of an overstrained girl. The thing was done; in so far as the authorities on the train were concerned, it was known that he was the man who had had the appointment with Gabriel Warden and had disappeared; and in so far as the train officials could act, he was accused and confined for the attack upon Basil Santoine. But besides being overwhelmed with the horror of this position, the manner in which he had been accused had roused him to helpless anger, to rage at his accusers which still increased as he heard the sounds on the other side of the partition where Avery was now trying to silence Harriet Santoine and lead her away.

Why had Avery gone at his accusation of him in that way? Connery had had the telegram in his pocket from the start of the questioning in the washroom; Avery had seen and read it; they could have condemned him with whomever they wished, merely by showing it. Why, then, had Avery chosen to drag this girl—strained and upset already by the attack upon her father and with long hours of nursing ahead of her before expert help could be got—step by step through their accusation of him? Eaton saw that—whatever Harriet Santoine's casual interest in himself might be—this showed at least that Avery's relation to her was not so completely accepted by her and so definite as appeared on the surface, since Avery thought it necessary to convince her rather than merely tell her. And what sent the blood hot and throbbing into Eaton's temples was the cruelty of Avery's action.

So Avery was that kind of a man! The kind that, when an end is to be attained, is ready to ignore as though unimportant the human side of things. Concurrently with these thoughts—as always with all his thoughts—was running the memory of his own experience—that experience of which Eaton had not spoken and of which he had avoided speaking at any cost; and as he questioned now whether Avery might be one of those men who to gain an end they deem necessary are ready to disregard humanity,—to inflict suffering, wrong, injustice,—he realized that he was beginning to hate Avery for himself, for what he was, aside from the accusation he brought.

No sounds came to him now from the washroom—the girl must have controlled herself; footsteps passing the door of his compartment told him then that the two had gone out into the open car.

CHAPTER X

THE BLIND MAN'S EYES

Half an hour later, Connery unlocked the door of Eaton's compartment, entered and closed the door behind him. He had brought in Eaton's traveling bag and put it down.

"You understand," said the conductor, "that when a train is stalled like this it is considered as if under way. So I have local police power, and I haven't exceeded my rights in putting you under arrest."

"I don't recall that I have questioned your right," Eaton answered shortly.

"I thought you might question it now. I'm going to search you. Are you going to make trouble or needn't I send for help?"

"I'll help you." Eaton took off his coat and vest and handed them over. The conductor put them on a seat while he felt over his prisoner for weapons or other concealed objects. Eaton handed him a pocket-knife, and the key to his traveling-bag—he had no other keys—from his trousers pockets. The conductor discovered nothing else. He found a pencil—but no papers or memorandum book—a plain gold watch, unengraved, and a bill-fold containing seven hundred dollars in United States bank-notes in the vest. Connery wrote out a receipt for the money and handed it to his prisoner. He returned the other articles. In the coat, the conductor found a handkerchief and in another pocket the torn scraps of the telegram delivered to Eaton in his berth.

"That's the one we had the fuss over in the dining car," Eaton volunteered, as the conductor began fitting the scraps together.

"You forgot to completely destroy it, eh?"

"What was the use?" Eaton took up the other's point of view. "You had a copy anyway."

"You might have wanted to get rid of it since the discovery of the murder."

"Murder?"

"I guess it's the same thing." The conductor dropped the scraps into an envelope and put it in his pocket. He examined the coat for a tailor's name.

"That coat was copied by a Chinaman in Amoy from the coat I had before. Before the new one was made, I took out the name of the other tailor so it wouldn't be copied too," Eaton remarked in explanation of the lack of any mark. Connery handed back the coat, went out and locked the door behind him.

Eaton opened his traveling bag and checked over the contents. He could tell that everything in it had been again carefully examined, but nothing more had been taken except the small Chinese-English dictionary; that was now gone. There had been nothing in the bag to betray any other identity than the one he had given. Eaton put the bag away and went back to his seat by the window.

The clear, bright day was drawing toward its dusk: there had been no movement or attempt to move the train all day. About six o'clock, as people began passing forward to the diner, Connery appeared again with a waiter from the dining car bearing a tray with dinner.

"This is 'on' the Department of Justice, Conductor?" Eaton tried to ask lightly.

"The check is a dollar twenty. If you want this, I'll charge it against your money which I have."

"Make it a dollar, forty-five then," Eaton directed. "Remember the waiter."

The black boy grinned and spread the table.

"How is Mr.—" Eaton began.

"Dorne?" Connery put in sharply.

"Thanks," said Eaton. "I understand. How is he?"

Connery did not answer, and with the waiter left him, locking him in again. At ten, Connery came once more with the porter of the car, and the conductor stood by silently while the porter made up the berth. Eaton went to bed with the car absolutely still, with only the wall of snow outside his window and no evidence of any one about but a subdued step occasionally passing his door. Though he had had nothing to do all the long, lonely hours of the evening but to think, Eaton lay awake thinking. He understood definitely now that whatever action was to be taken following his admission of his presence at Warden's, a charge of murder or of assault to kill—dependent upon whether Santoine died or seemed likely to recover—would be made against him at the first city they reached after the train had started again. He would be turned over to the police; inquiry would be made; then—he shrank from going further with these thoughts.

The night again was very cold; it was clear, with stars shining; toward midnight wind came; but little snow drifted now, for the cold had frozen a crust. In the morning, from somewhere over the snow-covered country, a man and a boy appeared at the top of the shining bank beside the train. They walked beside the sleepers to the dining car, where, apparently, they disposed of whatever they had brought in the bags they carried; they came back along the cars and then disappeared.

As he watched them, Eaton felt the desperate impulse to escape through the window and follow them; but he knew he surely would be seen; and even if he could get away unobserved, he would freeze; his overcoat and hat had been kept by Connery. The conductor came after a time and let in the porter, who unmade the berth and carried away the linen; and later, Connery came again with the waiter bringing breakfast. He had brought a magazine, which he dropped upon the seat beside Eaton; and he stood by until Eaton had breakfasted and the dishes were carried away.

"Want to talk yet?" he asked.

"No."

"Is there anything else you want?" he asked.

"I'd like to see Miss Santoine."

Connery turned away.

"You will tell Miss Santoine I have something I want to say to her?" Eaton asked more definitely.

Connery turned back. "If you've anything to say, tell it to me," he bade curtly.

"It will do no good to tell it to you. Will you tell her what I asked?"

"No," said Connery.

At noon, when they brought Eaton's luncheon, he repeated his request and was again refused; but less than an hour afterward Connery came to his door again, and behind Connery, Eaton saw Harriet Santoine and Avery.

Eaton jumped up, and as he saw the girl's pale face, the color left his own.

"Miss Santoine has asked to speak to you," Connery announced; and he admitted Harriet Santoine and Avery, and himself remaining outside in the aisle, closed the door upon them.

"How is your father?" Eaton asked the girl.

"He seems just the same; at least, I can't see any change, Mr. Eaton." She said something in a low tone to Avery, who nodded; then she sat down opposite Eaton, and Avery seated himself on the arm of the seat beside her.

"Can Dr. Sinclair see any difference?" Eaton asked.

"Dr. Sinclair will not commit himself except to say that so far as he can tell, the indications are favorable. He seems to think—" The girl choked; but when she went on, her blue eyes were very bright and her lips did not tremble. "Dr. Sinclair seems to think, Mr. Eaton, that Father was found just in time, and that whatever chance he has for recovery came from you. Mr. Avery and I had passed by the berth; other people had gone by. Sometimes Father had insomnia and wouldn't get to sleep till late in the morning; so I—and Mr. Avery too—would have left him undisturbed until noon. Dr. Sinclair says that if he had been left as long as that, he would have had no chance at all for life."

"He has a chance, then, now?"

"Yes; but we don't know how much. The change Dr. Sinclair is expecting may be either for better or worse. I—I wanted you to know, Mr. Eaton, that I recognize—that the chance Father may have came through you, and that I am trying to think of you as the one who gave him the chance."

The warm blood flooded Eaton's face, and he bowed his head. She, then, was not wholly hostile to him; she had not been completely convinced by Avery.

"What was it you wanted to tell Miss Santoine?" Avery challenged.

"What did Miss Santoine want to tell me?"

"What she has just told you."

Eaton thought for a moment. The realization that had come to him just now that something had kept the girl from condemning him as Avery and Connery had condemned him, and that somehow, for some reason, she must have been fighting within herself to-day and last night against the proof of his guilt, flushed him with gratitude and changed the attitude he had thought it was going to be necessary for him to take in this talk with her. As he looked up, her eyes met his; then she looked quickly away. Avery moved impatiently and repeated his question:

"What was it you wanted to say?"

"Are they looking for any one, Miss Santoine—any one besides me in connection with the attack upon your father?"

She glanced at Avery and did not answer. Avery's eyes narrowed. "We are quite satisfied with what we have been doing," he answered.

"Then they are not looking, Miss Santoine!"

Her lips pressed together, and again it was Avery who answered. "We have not said so."

"I must assume it, then," Eaton said to the girl without regarding Avery. "I have been watching as well as I could since they shut me up here, and I have listened, but I haven't found any evidence that anything more is being done. So I'm obliged to assume that nothing is being done. The few people who know about the attack on your father are so convinced and satisfied that I am the one who did it that they aren't looking any further. Among the people moving about on the train, the—the man who made the attack is being allowed to move about; he could even leave the train, if he could do so without being seen and was willing to take his chance in the snow; and when the train goes on, he certainly will leave it!"

Harriet Santoine turned questioningly to Avery again.

"I am not asking anything of you, you see," Eaton urged. "I'm not asking you to let me go or to give me any—any increase of liberty which might make it possible for me to escape. I—I'm only warning you that Mr. Avery and the conductor are making a mistake; and you don't have to have any faith in me or any belief that I'm telling the truth when I say that I didn't do it! I'm only warning you, Miss Santoine, that you mustn't let them stop looking! Why, if I had done it, I might very likely have had an accomplice whom they are going to let escape. It's only common sense, you see."

"That is what you wanted to say?" Avery asked.

"That is it," Eaton answered.

"We can go, then, Harriet."

But she made no move to go. Her eyes rested upon Eaton steadily; and while he had been appealing to her, a flush had come to her cheeks and faded away and come again and again with her impulses as he spoke.

"If you didn't do it, why don't you help us?" she cried.

"Help you?"

"Yes: tell us who you are and what you are doing? Why did you take the train because Father was on it, if you didn't mean any harm to him? Why don't you tell us where you are going or where you have been or what you have been doing? What did your appointment with Mr. Warden mean? And why, after he was killed, did you disappear until you followed Father on this train? Why can't you give the name of anybody you know or tell us of any one who knows about you?"

Eaton sank back against the seat away from her, and his eyes shifted to Avery standing ready to go, and then fell.

"I might ask you in return," Eaton said, "why you thought it worth while, Miss Santoine, to ask so much about myself when you first met me and before any of this had happened? You were not so much interested then in me personally as that; and it was not because you could have suspected I had been Mr. Warden's friend; for when the conductor charged that, it was a complete surprise to you."

"No; I did not suspect that."

"Then why were you curious about me?"

Before Avery could speak or even make a gesture, Harriet seemed to come to a decision. "My Father asked me to," she said.

"Your father? Asked you to do what?"

"To find out about you."

"Why?"

As she hesitated, Avery put his hand upon her shoulder as though warning her to be still; but she went on, after only an instant.

"I promised Mr. Avery and the conductor," she said, "that if I saw you I would listen to what you had to say but would not answer questions without their consent; but I seem already to have broken that promise. I have been wondering, since we have found out what we have about you, whether Father could possibly have suspected that you were Mr. Warden's friend; but I am quite sure that was not the original reason for his inquiring about you. My Father thought he recognized your voice, Mr. Eaton, when you were speaking to the conductor about your tickets. He thought he ought to know who you were. He knew that some time and somewhere he had been near you before, and had heard you speak; but he could not tell where or when. And neither Mr. Avery nor I could tell him who you were; so he asked us to find out. I do not know whether, after we had described you to Father, he may have connected you with Mr. Warden or not; but that could not have been in his mind at first."

Eaton had paled; Avery had seemed about to interrupt her, but watching Eaton, he suddenly had desisted.

"You and Mr. Avery?" Eaton repeated. "He sent you to find out about me?"

"Sent me—in this case—more than Mr. Avery; because he thought it would be easier for me to do it." Harriet had reddened under Eaton's gaze. "You understand, Mr. Eaton, it was—was entirely impersonal with me. My Father, being blind, is obliged to use the eyes of others—mine, for one; he has trained me to see for him ever since we used to take walks together when I was a little girl, and he has made me learn to tell him what I see in detail, in the way that he would see it himself; and for helping him to see other things on which I might be unable to report so definitely and clearly, he has Mr. Avery. He calls us his eyes, sometimes; and it was only—only because I had been commissioned to find out about you that I was obliged to show so much curiosity."

"I understand," said Eaton quietly. "Your report to your father, I suppose, convinced him that he had been mistaken in thinking he knew my voice."

"No—not that. He knew that he had heard it; for sounds have so much meaning to him that he never neglects or forgets them, and he carries in his mind the voices of hundreds of different people and almost never makes a mistake among them. It did make him surer that you were not any one with whose voice he ought to have been familiar, but only some one whom he had heard say something—a few words or sentences, maybe—under conditions which impressed your voice upon his mind. And he told Mr. Avery so, and that has only made Mr. Avery and the conductor more certain that you must be the—one. And since you will not tell—"

"To tell would only further confirm them—"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean they would be more certain it was I who—" Eaton, as he blundered with the words and checked himself, looked up apprehensively at Avery; but Avery, if he had thought that it was worth while to let this conversation go on in the expectation that Eaton might let slip something which could be used against himself, now had lost that expectation.

"Come, Harry," he said.

Harriet arose, and Eaton got up as she did and stood as she went toward the door.

"You said Mr. Avery and the conductor believe—" he began impulsively, in answer to the something within him which was urging him to know, to make certain, how far Harriet Santoine believed him to have been concerned in the attack upon her father. And suddenly he found that he did not need to ask. He knew; and with this sudden realization he all at once understood why she had not been convinced in spite of the conviction of the others—why, as, flushing and paling, she had just now talked with him, her manner had been a continual denial of the suspicion against him.

To Avery and to Connery the attack upon Santoine was made a vital and important thing by the prominence of Santoine and their own responsibility toward him, but after all there was nothing surprising in there having been an attack. Even to Harriet Santoine it could not be a matter of surprise; she knew—she must know—that the father whom she loved and thought of as the best of men, could not have accomplished all he had done without making enemies; but she could conceive of an attack upon him being made only by some one roused to insane and unreasoning hate against him or by some agent wicked and vile enough to kill for profit. She could not conceive of its having been done by a man whom, little as she had known him, she had liked, with whom she had chatted and laughed upon terms of equality. The accusation of the second telegram had overwhelmed her for a time, and had driven her from the defense of him which she had made after he had admitted his connection with Gabriel Warden; but now, Eaton felt, the impulse in his favor had returned. She must have talked over with her father many times the matter of the man whom Warden had determined to befriend; and plainly she had become so satisfied that he deserved consideration rather than suspicion that Connery's identification of Eaton now was to his advantage. Harriet Santoine could not yet answer the accusation of the second telegram against him, but—in reason or out of reason—her feelings refused acceptance of it.

It was her feelings that were controlling her now, as suddenly she faced him, flushed and with eyes suffused, waiting for the end of the sentence he could not finish. And as his gaze met hers, he realized that life—the life that held Harriet Santoine, however indefinite the interest might be that she had taken in him—was dearer to him than he had thought.

Avery had reached the door, holding it open for her to go out. Suddenly Eaton tore the handle from Avery's grasp, slammed the door shut upon him and braced his foot against it. He would be able to hold it thus for several moments before they could force it open.

"Miss Santoine," he pleaded, his voice hoarse with his emotion, "for God's sake, make them think what they are doing before they make a public accusation against me—before they charge me with this to others not on this train! I can't answer what you asked; I can't tell you now about myself; there is a reason—a fair and honest reason, and one which means life or death to me. It will not be merely accusation they make against me—it will be my sentence! I shall be sentenced before I am tried—condemned without a chance to defend myself! That is the reason I could not come forward after the murder of Mr. Warden. I could not have helped him—or aided in the pursuit of his enemies—if I had appeared; I merely would have been destroyed myself! The only thing I could hope to accomplish has been in following my present course—which, I swear to you, has had no connection with the attack upon your father. What Mr. Avery and Connery are planning to do to me, they cannot undo. They will merely complete the outrage and injustice already done me,—of which Mr. Warden spoke to his wife,—and they will not help your father. For God's sake, keep them from going further!"

Her color deepened, and for an instant, he thought he saw full belief in him growing in her eyes; but if she could not accept the charge against him, neither could she consciously deny it, and the hands she had been pressing together suddenly dropped.

"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."

"You understand that anything you write must be given to me unsealed."

"That's satisfactory to me. I don't believe that, even though it is unsealed, you'll take it upon yourself to read it."

The conductor looked puzzled, but sent the porter for some of the stationery the railroad furnished for passengers. The negro brought paper, and pen and ink, and set up the little table in front of Eaton; and when they had left him and had locked the door, Eaton wrote:

Miss Santoine:

The questions—all of them—that you and others have asked me you are going to find answered very soon—within a very few hours, it may be, certainly within a few days—though they are not going to be answered by me. When they are answered, you are going to think me the most despicable kind of man; you are not going to doubt, then,—for the answers will not let you doubt,—that I was the one who hurt your father. You, and every one else, are going to feel—not only because of that, but because of what you will learn about me—that nothing that may happen to me will be more than I justly deserve.

I don't seem to care very much what people other than you may think; as the time grows nearer, I feel that I care less and less about that; but I do care very much—and more and more—that you are going to think of me in this way. It is very hard for me to know that you are going to regret that you ever let me talk with you in the friendly way you did, or that you let me walk beside you on the station platform at Spokane, and that you are going to shrink with horror when you recollect that you let me touch you and put my hand upon your arm. I feel that you do not yet believe that it was I who attacked your father; and I ask you—even in face of the proof which you are so soon to receive—not to believe it. I took this train—

He stopped writing, recollecting that the letter was to be given to Connery unsealed and that Connery might read it; he scratched out the sentence he had begun; then he thought a moment and went on:

I ask you not to believe that. More than that, I ask you—when you have learned who I am—still to believe in me. I don't ask you to defend me against others; you could not do that, for you will see no one who will not hate and despise me. But I beg of you, in all honesty and faith, not to let yourself feel as they do toward me. I want you to believe—

He stopped again, but not because he felt that Harriet Santoine would not believe what he was asking her to believe; instead, it was because he knew she would. Mechanically he opened his traveling-bag and got out a cigar, bit off the end and forgetting in his absorption to light it, puffed and sucked at it. The future was sure ahead of him; he foresaw it plainly, in detail even, for what was happening to him was only the fulfillment of a threat which had been over him ever since he landed at Seattle. He was going out of life—not only Harriet Santoine's life, but all life, and the letter he was writing would make Harriet Santoine believe his death to have been an act of injustice, of cruelty. She could not help but feel that she herself had been in a way instrumental in his death, since it was the accusation of violence against her father which was going to show who he was and so condemn him. Dared he, dying, leave a sting like that in the girl's life?

He continued to puff at the unlighted cigar; then, mechanically, he struck a match to light it. As the match flared up, he touched it to the sheet on which he had been writing, held the paper until the written part was all consumed, and dropped it on the floor of the car, smiling down at it wryly and grimly. He would go out of Harriet Santoine's life as he had come into it—no, not that, for he had come into it as one who excited in her a rather pleasing doubt and curiosity, but he would go out of it as a man whom she must hate and condemn; to recall him would be only painful to her, so that she would try to kill within her all memory of him.

As he glanced to the window, he saw that they were passing through the outskirts of some place larger than any they had stopped at before; and realizing that this must be the place he had picked out on the map as the one where they would give him to the police, he closed his traveling bag and made ready to go with them. The train drew into the station and stopped; the porter, as it slowed, had unlocked and opened the door of his compartment, and he saw Connery outside upon the platform; but this was no different from their procedure at every stop. Several people got on the train here; others got off; so Connery, obviously, was not preventing those who had been on the train when Santoine was struck, from leaving it now. Eaton, as he saw Connery make the signal for the train to go ahead, sank back suddenly, conscious of the suspense he had been under.

He got out the railroad folder and looked ahead to the next town where he might be given up to the authorities; but when they rolled into this in the late afternoon the proceedings were no different. Eaton could not understand. He saw by studying the time-table that some time in the night they would pass the Montana state line into North Dakota. Didn't they intend to deliver him to the State authorities in Montana?

When the waiter brought his supper, Connery came with him.

"You wrote something to-day?" the conductor asked.

"I destroyed it."

Connery looked keenly around the compartment. "You brought me two envelopes; there they are. You brought three sheets of paper; here are two, and there's what's left of the other on the floor."

Connery seemed satisfied.

"Why haven't you jailed me?" Eaton asked.

"We're waiting to see how things go with Mr. Santoine."

"Has he been conscious?"

Connery did not answer; and through the conductor's silence Eaton sensed suddenly what the true condition of affairs must be. To give him up to the police would make public the attack upon Santoine; and until Santoine either died or recovered far enough to be consulted by them, neither Avery nor Connery—nor Connery's superiors, apparently—dared to take the responsibility of doing this. So Eaton would be carried along to whatever point they might reach when Santoine died or became fully conscious. Where would that be? Clear to Chicago?

It made no material difference to him, Eaton realized, whether the police took him in Montana or Chicago, since in either case recognition of him would be certain in the end; but in Chicago this recognition must be immediate, complete, and utterly convincing.

The next day the weather had moderated, or—here in North Dakota—it had been less severe; the snow was not deep except in the hollows, and on the black, windswept farmlands sprouts of winter wheat were faintly showing. The train was traveling steadily and faster than its regular schedule; it evidently was running as a special, some other train taking the ordinary traffic; it halted now only at the largest cities. In the morning it crossed into Minnesota; and in the late afternoon, slowing, it rolled into some large city which Eaton knew must be Minneapolis or St. Paul. All day he had listened for sounds in the Santoine car, but had heard nothing; the routine which had been established to take care of him had gone on through the day, and he had seen no one but Connery and the negro, and his questions to them had been unanswered.

The car here was uncoupled from the train and picked up by a switch engine; as dusk fell, Eaton, peering out of his window, could see that they had been left lying in the railroad yards; and about midnight, awakening in his berth, he realized that the car was still motionless. He could account for this stoppage in their progress only by some change in the condition of Santoine. Was Santoine sinking, so that they no longer dared to travel? Was he, perhaps—dead?

No sounds came to him from the car to confirm Eaton in any conclusion; there was nothing to be learned from any one outside the car. A solitary man, burly and alert, paced quietly back and forth below Eaton's window. He was a guard stationed to prevent any escape while the car was motionless in the yard.

Eaton lay for a long time, listening for other sounds and wondering what was occurring—or had occurred—at the other end of his car. Toward morning he fell asleep.

CHAPTER XI

PUBLICITY NOT WANTED

"Basil Santoine dying! Blind Millionaire lawyer taken ill on train!"

The alarm of the cry came to answer Eaton's question early the next morning. As he started up in his berth, he shook himself into realization that the shouts were not merely part of an evil dream; some one was repeating the cry outside the car window. He threw up the curtain and saw a vagrant newsboy, evidently passing through the railroad yards to sell to the trainmen. Eaton's guard outside his window was not then in sight; so Eaton lifted his window from the screen, removed that, and hailing the boy, put out his hand for a paper. He took it before he recalled that he had not even a cent; but he looked for his knife in his trousers pocket and tossed it out to the boy with the inquiry: "How'll that do?"

The boy gaped, picked it up, grinned and scampered off. Eaton spread the news-sheet before him and swiftly scanned the lines for information as to the fate of the man who, for four days, had been lying only forty feet away from him at the other end of a Pullman car.

The paper—a Minneapolis one—blared at him that Santoine's condition was very low and becoming rapidly worse. But below, under a Montana date-line, Eaton saw it proclaimed that the blind millionaire was merely sick; there was no suggestion anywhere of an attack. The paper stated only that Basil Santoine, returning from Seattle with his daughter and his secretary, Donald Avery, had been taken seriously ill upon a train which had been stalled for two days in the snow in Montana. The passenger from whom the information had been gained had heard that the malady was appendicitis, but he believed that was merely given out to cover some complication which had required surgical treatment on the train. He was definite as regarded the seriousness of Mr. Santoine's illness and described the measures taken to insure his quiet. The railroad officials refused, significantly, to make a statement regarding Mr. Santoine's present condition. There was complete absence of any suggestion of violence having been done; and also, Eaton found, there was no word given out that he himself had been found on the train. The column ended with the statement that Mr. Santoine had passed through Minneapolis and gone on to Chicago under care of Dr. Douglas Sinclair.

Eaton stared at the newspaper without reading, after he saw that. He thought first—or rather, he felt first—for himself. He had not realized, until now that he was told that Harriet Santoine had gone,—for if her father had gone on, of course she was with him,—the extent to which he had felt her fairness, almost her friendship to him. At least, he knew now that, since she had spoken to him after he was first accused of the attack on her father, he had not felt entirely deserted or friendless till now. And with this start of dread for himself, came also feeling for her. Even if they had taken her father from the other end of this car early in the night to remove him to another special car for Chicago, she would be still watching beside him on the train. Or was her watch beside the dying man over now? And now, if her father were dead, how could Harriet Santoine feel toward the one whom all others—if not she herself—accused of the murder of her father? For evidently it was murder now, not just "an attack."

But why, if Santoine had been taken away, or was dead or dying, had they left Eaton all night in the car in the yards? Since Santoine was dying, would there be any longer an object in concealing the fact that he had been murdered?

Eaton turned the page before him. A large print of a picture of Harriet Santoine looked at him from the paper—her beautiful, deep eyes gazing at him, as he often had surprised her, frankly interested, thoughtful, yet also gay. The newspaper had made up its lack of more definite and extended news by associating her picture with her father's and printing also a photograph of Donald Avery—"closely associated with Mr. Santoine in a confidential capacity and rumored to be engaged to Miss Santoine." Under the blind man's picture was a biography of the sort which newspaper offices hold ready, prepared for the passing of the great.

Eaton did not read that then. The mention in the paper of an engagement between Avery and Harriet Santoine had only confirmed the relation which Eaton had imagined between them. Avery, therefore, must have gone on with her; and if she still watched beside her father, Avery was with her; and if Basil Santoine was dead, his daughter was turning to Avery for comfort.

This feature somehow stirred Eaton so that he could not stay quiet; he dressed and then paced back and forth the two or three steps his compartment allowed him. He stopped now and then to listen; from outside came the noises of the yard; but he made out no sound within the car. If it had been occupied as on the days previous, he must have heard some one coming to the washroom at his end. Was he alone in the car now? or had the customary moving about taken place before he awoke?

Eaton had seen no one but the newsboy when he looked out the window, but he felt sure that, if he had been left alone in the car, he was being watched so that he could not escape.

His hand moved toward the bell, then checked itself. By calling any one, he now must change his situation only for the worse; as long as they were letting him stay there, so much the better. He realized that it was long past the time when the porter usually came to make up his berth and they brought him breakfast; the isolation of the car might account for this delay, but it was more likely that he was to find another reason.

Finally, to free himself from his nervous listening for sounds which never came, he picked up the paper again. A column told of Santoine's youth, his blindness, his early struggle to make a place for himself and his final triumph—position, wealth and power gained; Eaton, reading of Harriet Santoine's father, followed these particulars with interest; and further down the column his interest became even greater. He read:

The news of Mr. Santoine's visit of a week on the Coast, if not known already in great financial circles, is likely to prove interesting there. Troubles between little people are tried in the courts; the powerful settle their disagreements among themselves and without appeal to the established tribunals in which their cases are settled without the public knowing they have been tried at all. Basil Santoine, of late years, has been known to the public as one of the greatest and most influential of the advisers to the financial rulers of America; but before the public knew him he was recognized by the financial masters as one of the most able, clear-minded and impartial of the adjudicators among them in their own disputes. For years he has been the chief agent in keeping peace among some of the great conflicting interests, and more than once he has advised the declaring of financial war when war seemed to him the correct solution. Thus, five years ago, when the violent death of Matthew Latron threatened to precipitate trouble among Western capitalists, Santoine kept order in what might very well have become financial chaos. If his recent visit to the Pacific Coast was not purely for personal reasons but was also to adjust antagonisms such as charged by Gabriel Warden before his death, the loss of Santoine at this time may precipitate troubles which, living, his advice and information might have been able to prevent.

Having read and reread this long paragraph, Eaton started to tear out the picture of Harriet Santoine before throwing the paper away; then he desisted and thrust the sheets out the window. As he sat thinking, with lips tight closed, he heard for the first time that morning footsteps at his end of the car. The door of his compartment was unlocked and opened, and he saw Dr. Sinclair.

"Mr. Santoine wants to speak to you," the surgeon announced quietly.

This startling negation of all he imagined, unnerved Eaton. He started up, then sank back for better composure.

"Mr. Santoine is here, then?"

"Here? Of course he's here."

"And he's conscious?"

"He has been conscious for the better part of two days. Didn't they tell you?" Sinclair frowned. "I heard Miss Santoine send word to you by the conductor soon after her father first came to himself."

"You mean he will recover!"

"He would recover from any injury which was not inevitably fatal. He was in perfect physical condition, and I never have known a patient to grasp so completely the needs of his own case and to help the surgeon as much by his control of himself."

Eaton looked toward the window, breathing hard. "I heard the newsboys—"

Sinclair shrugged. "The papers print what they can get and in the way which seems most effective to them," was his only comment.

Eaton pulled himself together. So Santoine was neither dead nor dying. Therefore, at worst, the charge of murder would not be made; and at best—what? He was soon to find out; the papers evidently were entirely in error or falsely informed. Basil Santoine was still at the other end of the car, and his daughter would be with him there. But as Eaton followed Sinclair out of the compartment into the aisle, he halted a moment—the look of the car was so entirely different from what he had expected. A nurse in white uniform sat in one of the seats toward the middle of the car, sewing; another nurse, likewise clothed in white, had just come out from the drawing-room at the end of the car; Avery and Sinclair apparently had been playing cribbage, for Avery sat at a little table in the section which had been occupied by Santoine, with the cards and cribbage board in front of him. The surgeon led Eaton to the door of the drawing-room, showed him in and left him.

Harriet Santoine was sitting on the little lounge opposite the berth where her father lay. She was watching the face of her father, and as Eaton stood in the door, he saw her lean forward and gently touch her father's hand; then she turned and saw Eaton.

"Here is Mr. Eaton, Father," she said.

"Sit down," Santoine directed.

Harriet made room for Eaton upon the seat beside her; and Eaton, sitting down, gazed across at the blind man in the berth. Santoine was lying flat on his back, his bandaged head turned a little toward Eaton and supported by pillows; he was not wearing his dark glasses, and his eyes were open. Eyes of themselves are capable of no expression except as they may be clear or bloodshot, or by the contraction or dilation of the pupils, or as they shift or are fixed upon some object: their "expression" is caused by movements of the lids and brows and other parts of the face. Santoine's eyes had the motionlessness of the eyes of those who have been long blind; seeing nothing, with pupils which did not change in size, they had only the abstracted look which, with men who see, accompanies deep thought. The blind man was very weak and must stay quite still; and he recognized it; but he knew too that his strength was more than equal to the task of recovery, and he showed that he knew it. His mind and will were, obviously, at their full activity, and he had fully his sense of hearing.

This explained to Eaton the better color in his daughter's face; yet she was still constrained and nervous; evidently she had not found her ordeal over with the start of convalescence of her father. Her lips trembled now as she turned to Eaton; but she did not speak directly to him yet; it was Basil Santoine who suddenly inquired:

"What is it they call you?"

"My name is Philip D. Eaton." Eaton realized as soon as he had spoken that both question and answer had been unnecessary, and Santoine had asked only to hear Eaton's voice.

The blind man was silent for a moment, as he seemed to consider the voice and try again vainly to place it in his memories. Then he spoke to his daughter.

"Describe him, Harriet."

Harriet paled and flushed.

"About thirty," she said, "—under rather than over that. Six feet or a little more in height. Slender, but muscular and athletic. Skin and eyes clear and with a look of health. Complexion naturally rather fair, but darkened by being outdoors a good deal. Hair dark brown, straight and parted at the side. Smooth shaven. Eyes blue-gray, with straight lashes. Eyebrows straight and dark. Forehead smooth, broad and intelligent. Nose straight and neither short nor long; nostrils delicate. Mouth straight, with lips neither thin nor full. Chin neither square nor pointed, and without a cleft. Face and head, in general, of oval Anglo-American type."

"Go on," said Santoine.

Harriet was breathing quickly. "Hands well shaped, strong but without sign of manual labor; nails cared for but not polished. Gray business suit, new, but not made by an American tailor and of a style several years old. Soft-bosomed shirt of plain design with soft cuffs. Medium-height turn-down white linen collar. Four-in-hand tie, tied by himself. Black shoes. No jewelry except watch-chain."

"In general?" Santoine suggested.

"In general, apparently well-educated, well-bred, intelligent young American. Expression frank. Manner self-controlled and reserved. Seems sometimes younger than he must be, sometimes older. Something has happened at some time which has had a great effect and can't be forgotten."

While she spoke, the blood, rising with her embarrassment, had dyed Harriet's face; suddenly now she looked away from him and out the window.

Her feeling seemed to be perceived by Santoine. "Would you rather I sent for Avery, daughter?" he asked.

"No; no!" She turned again toward Eaton and met his look defiantly.

Eaton merely waited. He was confident that much of this description of himself had been given Santoine by his daughter before the attack had been made on him and that she had told him also as fully as she could the two conversations she had had with Eaton. He could not, somehow, conceive it possible that Santoine needed to refresh his memory; the description, therefore, must have been for purposes of comparison. Santoine, in his blindness, no doubt found it necessary to get descriptions of the same one thing from several people, in order that he might check one description against another. He probably had Harriet's and Avery's description of Eaton and now was getting Harriet's again.

"He would be called, I judge, a rather likable-looking man?" Santoine said tentatively; his question plainly was only meant to lead up to something else; Santoine had judged in that particular already.

"I think he makes that impression."

"Certainly he does not make the impression of being a man who could be hired to commit a crime?"

"Very far from it."

"Or who would commit a crime for his own interest—material or financial interest, I mean?"

"No."

"But he might be led into crime by some personal, deeper interest. He has shown deep feeling, I believe—strong, personal feeling, Harriet?"

"Yes."

"Mr. Eaton,"—Santoine addressed him suddenly,—"I understand that you have admitted that you were at the house of Gabriel Warden the evening he was killed while in his car. Is that so?"

"Yes," said Eaton.

"You are the man, then, of whom Gabriel Warden spoke to his wife?"

"I believe so."

"You believe so?"

"I mean," Eaton explained quietly, "that I came by appointment to call on Mr. Warden that night. I believe that it must have been to me that Mr. Warden referred in the conversation with his wife which has since been quoted in the newspapers."

"Because you were in such a situation that, if Mr. Warden defended you, he would himself meet danger?"

"I did not say that," Eaton denied guardedly.

"What, then, was your position in regard to Mr. Warden?"

Eaton remained silent.

"You refuse to answer?" Santoine inquired.

"I refuse."

"In spite of the probability that Mr. Warden met his death because of his intention to undertake something for you?"

"I have not been able to fix that as a probability."

The blind man stopped. Plainly he appreciated that, where Connery and Avery had failed in their questionings, he was not likely to succeed easily; and with his limited strength, he proceeded on a line likely to meet less prepared resistance.

"Mr. Eaton, have I ever injured you personally—I don't mean directly, as man to man, for I should remember that; have I ever done anything which indirectly has worked injury on you or your affairs?"

"No," Eaton answered.

"Who sent you aboard this train?"

"Sent me? No one."

"You took the train of your own will because I was taking it?"

"I have not said I took it because you were taking it."

"That seems to be proved. You can accept it from me; it has been proved. Did you take the train in order to attack me?"

"No."

"To spy upon me?"

"No."

Santoine was silent for an instant. "What was it you took the train to tell me?"

"I? Nothing."

Santoine moved his head upon the pillow.

"Father!" his daughter warned.

"Oh, I am careful, Harriet; Dr. Sinclair allows me to move a little.... Mr. Eaton, in one of the three answers you have just given me, you are not telling the truth. I defy you to find in human reasoning more than four reasons why my presence could have made you take this train in the manner and with the attending circumstances you did. You took it to injure me, or to protect me from injury; to learn something from me, or to inform me of something. I discard the second of these possibilities because you asked for a berth in another car and for other reasons which make it impossible. However, I will ask it of you. Did you take the train to protect me from injury?"

"No."

"Which of your former answers do you wish to change, then?"

"None."

"You deny all four possibilities?"

"Yes."

"Then you are using denial only to hide the fact, whatever it may be; and of the four possibilities I am obliged to select the first as the most likely."

"You mean that I attacked you?"

"That is not what I said. I said you must have taken the train to injure me, but that does not mean necessarily that it was to attack me with your own hand. Any attack aimed against me would be likely to have several agents. There would be somewhere, probably, a distant brain that had planned it; there would be an intelligent brain near by to oversee it; and there would be a strong hand to perform it. The overseeing brain and the performing hand—or hands—might belong to one person, or to two, or more. How many there were I cannot now determine, since people were allowed to get off the train. The conductor and Avery—"

"Father!"