one go crashing away down the gully, breaking the bushes that
impeded his flight.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THE MISERERE OF MOTHERHOOD

The up-train came shrieking out of the last tunnel in Feather River
Canyon, churned around a curve, struck a hollow roar from the trestle
that bridges the mouth of Toll-Gate creek, shrieked again when it saw,
down the white trail of its headlight, the whirling snow that swept
down the canyon, and churned up the stiff grade that would carry it
around through the Pocket at the head of the canyon and to the little
yellow station just beyond. A fight it would have to top the summit of
the Sierras and slip down into the desert beyond, but it climbed the
grade with a vicious kind of energy, twisted around the point of the
hill where the Crystal Lake trail crossed and climbed higher, and with
a last scream at the station lights it slewed past the curve, clicked
over a switch or two and stood panting there in the storm, waiting to
see whether it might go on and get the ordeal over with at once, or
whether it must wait until the down train passed.

A thin, yellow slip ordered it to wait, since it was ten minutes
behind time. The down train was just then screaming into Spring Garden
and would come straight on. So the up train stood there puffing like
the giant thing it was, while the funny little train from Quincy
fussed back upon a different siding and tried its best to puff as loud
as its big, important neighbor while it waited, too, for the down
train.

Two men and a woman plowed through the wind and the snow and mounted
wearily the steps of the little coach which comprised the branch
line's passenger service. The two men took it all as a matter of
course--the bare little coach with plush seats and an air of transient
discomfort. They were used to it, and they did not mind.

The woman, however, halted inside the door and glanced around her with
incredulous disdain. She seemed upon the point of refusing to ride in
so crude a conveyance; seemed about to complain to the conductor and
to demand something better. She went forward under protest and drew
her gloved fingers across the plush back of a seat, looked at her
fingers and said, "Hmh!" as though her worst fears were confirmed. She
looked at one of the men and spoke as she would speak to a servant.

"Is there no other coach on this train?"

"No, ma'am!" the man said, accenting the first word as though he
wished to prevent argument