the timetable had in no way attempted to deceive
him--he was only cold. He turned up his coat collar--and blew on his
kid-gloved fingers.

As far as he could see everything was white with a thin layer of
snow--he kicked some of it off his toes onto the unshovelled platform.
The landscape was disconsolately void of even a vestige of life, there
was not a sign of habitation--just woods of bare trees, except the firs,
whose green seemed out of place.

"I have arrived," said John Garfield Madison to himself, "at a
cemetery."

There was a very small station, and through the window he caught sight
of a harassed-faced, red-haired man. There was a thump, another one, a
very vicious one--and Madison stirred uneasily--the train, with its five
minutes' delinquency hanging over it, was already moving out, as his
trunks, from the baggage car ahead, shot unceremoniously to the
platform. Madison watched a man, the sole occupant of the platform apart
from himself, save the trunks from rolling under the wheels of the
train; then his eyes fastened on a rickety, two-seated wagon, drawn by a
horse that at first glance appeared to earn all it got.

The train left the platform--and left quite as uninviting a perspective
on the other side of the track as had previously greeted Madison's
restricted view. But now the man who had salvaged his baggage came down
the platform toward him. Madison inspected the approaching figure with
interest. The man ambled along without haste, his jaws wagging
industriously upon his tobacco, his iron-gray chin whiskers, from the
wagging, flapping like a burgee in a breeze. He wore a round fur cap,
quite bare of fur at the edges where the pelt showed shiny, and a red
woollen tippet was tied round his neck and knotted at the back with the
ends dangling down over his coat. The coat itself, a long one of some
fuzzy material, with huge side pockets into which the man's hands were
plunged, reached to the cavernous tops of jackboots where the nether
ends of his trousers were stowed away.

The man halted before Madison, and, reaching a mittened hand under his
chin, reflectively lifted his whiskers to an acute angle, while his blue
eyes over the rims of steel-bowed spectacles wandered from Madison to
Madison's dress-suit case and back to Madison again.

"Be you goin' to git off here?" he inquired.

Madison smiled at him engagingly.

"Well," he said, "I wouldn't care to have it known, but if you can keep
a secret-