the pursuit of his enemies--if I
had appeared; I merely would have been destroyed myself! The only
thing I could hope to accomplish has been in following my present
course--which, I swear to you, has had no connection with the attack
upon your father. What Mr. Avery and Connery are planning to do to me,
they cannot undo. They will merely complete the outrage and injustice
already done me,--of which Mr. Warden spoke to his wife,--and they will
not help your father. For God's sake, keep them from going further!"

Her color deepened, and for an instant, he thought he saw full belief
in him growing in her eyes; but if she could not accept the charge
against him, neither could she consciously deny it, and the hands she
had been pressing together suddenly dropped.

"I--I'm afraid nothing I could say would have much effect on them,
knowing as little about--about you as I do!"

They dashed the door open then--silenced and overwhelmed him; and they
took her from the room and left him alone again. But there was
something left with him which they could not take away; for in the
moment he had stood alone with her and passionately pleading, something
had passed between them--he could give no name to it, but he knew that
Harriet Santoine never could think of him again without a stirring of
her pulses which drew her toward him. And through the rest of the
lonely day and through the sleepless night, he treasured this and
thought of it again and again.

The following morning the relieving snowplows arrived from the east,
and Eaton felt it was the beginning of the end for him. He watched
from his window men struggling in the snow about the forward end of the
train; then the train moved forward past the shoveled and trampled snow
where rock and pieces of the snowplow were piled beside the
track--stopped, waited; finally it went on again and began to take up
its steady progress.

The attack upon Santoine having taken place in Montana, Eaton thought
that he would be turned over to the police somewhere within that State,
and he expected it would be done at the first stop; but when the train
slowed at Simons, he saw the town was nothing more than a little hamlet
beside a side-track. They surely could not deliver him to the village
authorities here. The observation car and the Santoine car were
uncoupled here and the train made up again with the Santoine car as the
last car of the train and the observation car ahead of it. This