art, with muttering lips.

"What's wrong with you?" he demanded brusquely.

The man drew back with a growl that was like a beast's, lips curling
back over the teeth. Bradley stared at him coolly, then turned
inquiringly to the crowd in the car. He was greeted with a burst of
unintelligible, polyglot words, and spontaneous, excitable
gesticulations. Bradley shrugged his shoulders, and slammed the door
behind him.

Outside on the buffer, he reached for the ladder, swung himself up the
iron rungs to the top of the car, and, with his lantern hooked in his
arm, sat down on the footboard, bracing himself against the brake
wheel, and buttoned his reefer--there was another night--to
think--ahead of him.

To think--if he could only forget! It was that fearful sense of
impotency--impotency--impotency. It seemed to laugh and jeer and mock
at him. It seemed to make a plaything of this father love of his.
There was nothing--nothing he could do to bring her back--that was
it--nothing! Soul, life, mind and body, he would have given them all
to have saved her--would give them now to bring her back--and there was
only this ghastly impotency. It seemed at times that it would drive
him mad--and he could not forget. And then the bitter, crushing grief;
the rebellion, fierce, ungovernable, that his _all_ should have been
taken from him, that the years he had planned should be turned to
nothing but grinning mockery; and then that raging sense of impotency
again, that rocked his turbulent soul as in an angry, storm-tossed sea.

Time passed, and he sat there motionless, save for the jolting of the
train that bumped him this way and that against the brake wheel. They
were into the mountains now; and the snowy summits, moon-touched,
reared themselves in white, grotesque, fanciful shapes, and seemed,
cold in their beauty, to bring an added chill to the frosty night.
Ahead, far ahead, the headlight's ray swept now the track, now the gray
rock side, now, softly green, a clump of pines, as the right of way
curved and twisted and turned; now, slowing up a grade, the heavy,
growling bark of the exhaust came with long intervals between, and now,
on the level, it was quick as the tattoo of a snare drum, with the
short stack belching a myriad fiery sparks insolently skyward in a
steady stream; around him was the sweep of the wind, the roar of the
train, the pound of the trucks beating the fish-plates, the sway, the
jerk, the recovery of t