our host's
well-broken cow ponies over to El Tovar for dinner. Since it was not
the tourist season there were not many guests in the great inn; but
one, a man who sat by himself in a far corner of the dining-room, gave
me a turn that made me sick and faint at my first sight of him. The
man was big and swarthy of face, and he wore a pair of drooping
mustaches. For one heart-stopping instant I made sure it was William
Cummings, the deputy prison warden who had so miraculously missed
seeing me in the dining-car of my train of escape. But since nothing
happened and he paid no manner of attention to us, I decided gratefully
that it was only a resemblance. There was no such name as Cummings on
the hotel register, which I examined after we left the dining-room, and
I saw no more of the man with the drooping mustaches.

Momentary as the shock had been, I found that Polly had remarked it.
She spoke of it on the ride back to our retreat at Carter's.

"Are you feeling entirely well, Jimmie, dear?" she asked; and before I
could reply: "You had a bad turn of some sort while we were at table.
I saw it in your face and eyes."

I hastened to assure her that there was nothing the matter with me;
that there couldn't be anything the matter with a man who had died and
gone to heaven nearly a month previous to the dinner at El Tovar.

"But the man has got to go back to earth again pretty soon, and take
the woman with him," she retorted, laughing. "Just think, Jimmie; it
has been nearly a month, as you say, and we haven't had a letter or a
telegram in all that time! Not that I'm regretting anything; I'm
happy, dearest--as happy as an angel with wings; but I want to see my
daddy."

The heavenly path was leading back into the old world again, the
fighting world, and I knew it, and presently we were taking all the
steps of the delightful vanishing in reverse; boarding the through
train at Williams, catching glimpses of the stupendous majesty of
mountain and plain as the powerful locomotives towed us up the grades
of the Raton, doing a brisk walk on the platform at Albuquerque while
the train paused, and all the rest of it.

From Trinidad I wired Barrett, telling him that we were on our way
home; that we should go in by way of Colorado Springs instead of
Florence, with a stop-over between trains for dinner at the Antlers. I
half-expected he would run down to the Springs to meet us, and so he
did, bringing Father Phineas with him.