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.