red to risk things with canned
thunder in boxes and an explosive young man whose possession just then
was nine points and a considerable fraction.

Latisan was left to himself.

At last the train from downcountry rumbled in, halted briefly, and went
on its way. From his place in the end of the freight car Latisan could
command only a narrow slice of outdoors through the open side door.
Persons paraded past on their way to the coach of the narrow-gauge. He
could see their backs only. There had been a thrill for him in the job
he had just performed; he promptly got a new and more lively thrill even
though he ridiculed his sensations a moment later. Among the heads of
the arrivals he got a glimpse of an object for which he had stretched
his neck and strained his eyes--the anxious soul of him in his eyes--on
the street in New York City. He saw a green toque with a white quill.

As though a girl--such a girl as he judged her to be--would still be
wearing the same hat, all those months later! But that hat and the very
cock of the angle of the quill formed, in a way, the one especially
vivid memory of his life. However, he had a vague, bachelor notion that
women's hats resembled their whims--often changed and never twice alike,
and he based no hopes on what he had seen.

Whoever she was, she was on the train. But there were stations between
the junction and Adonia--not villages, but the mouths of roads which led
far into remote regions where a green toque could not be traced readily.
He acutely desired to inform himself regarding the face under that hat.
But he had made possession the full ten points of his law, sitting on
that load of dynamite. What if he should allow that train crew an
opening and give Echford Flagg complete confirmation of the report that
his drive master was a sapgag with women?

After the intenseness of the thrill died out of him he smiled at the
idea that a chance meeting in New York could be followed up in this
fashion in the north country. At any rate, he had something with which
to busy his thoughts during the slow drag of the train up to Adonia, and
he was able to forget in some measure that he was sitting on dynamite
and would face even more menacing explosives of another kind when the
drive was on its way.

He posted himself in the side door of the car when the train rolled
along beside the platform at Adonia. He had ordered men of the Flagg
outfit to be at the station with sleds, waiting for