nd I turned around to answer, and
there, just stepping off the Pullman, was Mr. Willett, looking back and
giving his hand to the lady herself. The handcuffed prisoner was just
opposite them at the moment, between two soldiers, and then the next
thing I knew I heard an awful scream, and the lady had covered her face
with her hands and fallen back on the steps, right at the feet of an
officer who was just coming out, and the prisoner thought he saw a
chance, perhaps, and gave a spring and dove like a rat under the car,
the guard clumsily following, and Mr. Willett stared about him one
instant, with a face that turned the color of chalk, then he too gave a
sort of stifled exclamation, 'My God!' and sprang up the steps and over
the platform of the day-car and was out of sight in the flash of an eye.
We heard shouts of 'Halt, halt, or we fire!' from the guards on the
other side of the car, and then two quick shots a little distance away,
and another wail or cry from the lady, and then I felt some one brush by
me, and the lieutenant sprang to her side, lifted her in his arms as he
reached the steps, and carried her, without a word, into the car by an
open window, where she cowered and sobbed and shivered and moaned, and
he all the time bending over and striving to soothe and calm her."

But when that train drew up at the station at Omaha an ambulance
received the bleeding, pain-distorted form of the prisoner Howard, shot
through the leg in his mad effort to escape. Leonard and Truman,
scanning every face as the passengers stepped off the cars, waved their
hands in greeting to the knot of officers on the sleeper platform, and
Leonard sprang aboard, inquiry in his snapping black eyes. They made way
silently for him to enter, and then he knew not whether to believe his
senses.

"Leonard," said Davies, quietly, "my wife came on to surprise me at
Omaha, not expecting me this way. I supposed she'd already come in with
the Cranstons. She was hardly well enough for the journey. Will you
kindly order a carriage?"

She was driven away in the very dust of the ambulance that was trundling
one poor wounded fellow to hospital, the conductor lamenting that a
woman so young and lovely should be thus afflicted. No one else aboard
that train could dream from Davies's words or manner that any other
explanation for her coming existed than that she was simply hastening to
Omaha to meet him.

But no claimant appeared for the handsome leather b