ed for her, Gertrude,
in her corner, felt a lonely sense of being in the way. In her
father's car there was never lacking the waiting deference of trainmen;
in the cab the men did not even see her.

In the seclusion of the car a storm hardly made itself felt; in the cab
she seemed under the open sky. The wind buffeted the glass at her
side, rattled in its teeth the door in front of her, drank the steaming
flame from the stack monstrously, and dashed the cinders upon the thin
roof above her head with terrifying force. With the gathering speed of
the engine the cracking exhaust ran into a confusing din that deafened
her, and she was shaken and jolted. The plunging of the cab grew
violent, and with every lurch her cushion shifted alarmingly. She
resented Glover's placing himself so far away, and could not see that
he even looked toward her. The furnace door slammed until she thought
the fireman must have thrown in coal enough to last till morning, but
unable to realize the danger of overloading the fire he stopped only
long enough to turn various valve-wheels about her feet, and with his
back bent resumed his hammering and shovelling as if his very salvation
were at stake: so, indeed, that night it was.

Gertrude watched his unremitting toil; his shifty balancing on his
footing with ever-growing amazement, but the others gave it not the
slightest heed. The engineer looked only ahead, and Glover's face
behind him never turned. Then Gertrude for the first time looked
through her own sash out into the storm.

Strain as she would, her vision could pierce to nothing beyond the
ceaseless sweep of the thin, wild snow across the brilliant flow of the
headlight. She looked into the white whirl until her eyes tired, then
back to the cab, at the flying shovel of the fireman, the peaked cap of
the muffled engineer--at Glover behind him, his hand resting now on the
reverse lever hooked high at his elbow. But some fascination drew her
eyes always back to that bright circle in the front--to the sinister
snow retreating always and always advancing; flowing always into the
headlight and out, and above it darkening into the fire that streamed
from the dripping stack. A sudden lurch nearly threw her from her
seat, and she gave a little scream as the engine righted. Glover
beside her like thought caught her outstretched hand. "A curve," he
said, bending apologetically toward her ear as she reseated herself.
"Is it very trying?