ucceeded?"

"Yes. Could you eat what they sent?"

"Pray look. I have left absolutely nothing and I am very grateful. Do
I not seem so?" she added, searchingly. "I want to because I am."

He smiled at her earnestness. Two little chairs were drawn up at the
table, and facing each other they sat down while Gertrude finished her
coffee and made Glover take a sandwich.

When the train conductor came in ten minutes later Glover talked with
him. While the men spoke Gertrude noticed how Glover overran the
dainty chair she had provided. She scrutinized his rough-weather garb,
the heavy hunting boots, the stout reefer buttoned high, and the
leather cap crushed now with his gloves in his hand. She had been
asking him where he got the cap, and a moment before, while her
attention wandered, he had told her the story of a company of Russian
noblemen and engineers from Vladivostok, who, during the summer, had
been his guests, nominally on a bear hunt, though they knew better than
to hunt bears in summer. It was really to pick up points on American
railroad construction. He might go, he thought, the following spring
to Siberia himself, perhaps to stay--this man that feared the wind--he
had had a good offer. The cap was a present.

The two men went out and she was left alone. A flagman, hat in hand,
passed through the car. The shock of the engine coupler striking the
buffer hardly disturbed her reverie; for her the night meant too much.

Glover was with the operators giving final instructions to Giddings for
ploughs to meet them without fail at Point of Rocks. Hastening from
the office he looked again at the barometer. It promised badly and the
thermometer stood at ten degrees above zero.

He had made his way through the falling snow to where they were
coupling the engine to the car, watched narrowly, and going forward
spoke to the engineer. When he re-entered the car it was moving slowly
out of the yard.

Gertrude, with a smile, put aside her book. "I am so glad," she said,
looking at her watch. "I hope we shall get there by eleven o'clock; we
should, should we not, Mr. Glover?"

"It's a poor night for making a schedule," was all he said. The arcs
of the long yard threw white and swiftly passing beams of light through
the windows, and the warmth within belied the menace outside.

At the rear end of the car the flagman worked with one of the
tail-lights that burned badly, and the conductor watched him. Ger