d as if to call
attention to the view from the window. It was then that the smash came.
When Ezekiel and some others, who were only thrown to the floor, looked
up again, Auber was gone.

You see, the time is identical; we calculated it exactly, for the train
left Newark on time and takes just six minutes to reach the bridge; that
is, at exactly noon. When I noticed the hour here, it was, perhaps, a
few minutes later, and that is not a difference in timepieces, for it
was by his own watch on the bedside table. No one saw him on the train
or on the bridge after that. It seems conclusive, just that alone. They
finally decided that he must have fallen from the window and somehow
rolled from the sleepers into the river.

Actually no one else in the Pullman was badly hurt. The men picked
themselves up and rushed to the doors of the car, or climbed out of the
windows. Ezekiel put his head through the shattered pane which Auber had
struck. Men were running toward the car ahead, from which screams came.
In the excitement of rescuing those from the telescoped coach, Auber was
forgotten; but when it was all over, Ezekiel and Judson looked
everywhere for him, till they assured themselves that he was not on the
bridge.

At all events, that is how he came to be reported among "The
Missing,--known by friends to have been on the train,--Auber Hurn, the
artist."

During that night, when Ezekiel and Judson had come down in response to
my telegrams, we sat here, talking endlessly, guessing, relating, slowly
developing the theory of the thing, delving into our minds for memories
of him, gradually getting below the facts, gradually working back to
them, examining the connections, completing the chain. The main fact,
the culmination, had to be the soulless shell of him, lying there in the
next room. Our theory began far away from that, in what he used to call
"white sleep," and more especially in a curious occasional association
between the dreams of this sleep and the landscape pictures that he
painted. What impressed you most as he recounted one of those
half-conscious dream concoctions, that he named "white-sleep fancies,"
was the remarkable scenery, the setting of the dream. This was in
character with his pictures, for about them both you felt that
peculiarly pervasive "sense of place," for which his landscape is of
course famous, and which in these dreams was emphasized through a subtle
ominousness of atmosphere. You perceived what