o find if he sent any telegram off.
When he had once given way to this anxiety, which he knew to be
perfectly stupid and futile, he had to yield to it at every station. He
took his bag with him each time he left the car, and he meant not to go
back if he saw the conductor telegraphing. It was intensely cold, and in
spite of the fierce heat of the stove at the end of the car, the frost
gathered thickly on the windows. The train creaked, when it stopped and
started, as if it were crunching along on a bed of dry snow; the noises
of the wheels seemed at times to lose their rhythmical cadence, and then
Northwick held his breath for fear one of them might be broken. He had a
dread of accident such as he had never felt before; his life had never
seemed so valuable to him as now; he reflected that it was so because it
was to be devoted now to retrieving the past in a new field under new
conditions. His life, in this view, was not his own; it was a precious
trust which he held for others, first for his children, and then for
those whom he was finally to save from loss by the miscarriage of his
enterprises. He justified himself anew in what he was intending; it
presented itself as a piece of self-sacrifice, a sacred duty which he
was bound to fulfil. All the time he knew that he was a defaulter who
had used the money in his charge, and tampered with the record so as to
cover up the fact, and that he was now absconding, and was carrying off
a large sum of money that was not morally his. At one of the stations
where he got out to see whether the conductor was telegraphing, he
noticed the conductor eyeing his bag curiously; and he knew that he
believed there was money in it. Northwick felt a thrill of gratified
cunning in realizing how mistaken the conductor was; but he was willing
the fellow should think he was carrying up money to pay off his quarry
hands.

He was impatient to reach the Junction, where this conductor would leave
the train, and it would continue northward in the charge of another man;
he seldom went beyond Willoughby on that road, and the new conductor
would hardly know him. He meant to go on to Blackbrook Junction, and
take the New England Central there for Montreal; but he saw the
conductor go to the telegraph office at Willoughby Junction, and it
suddenly occurred to him that he must not go to Montreal by a route so
direct that any absconding defaulter would be expected to take it. He
had not the least proof tha