spital for three weeks.

The Indians had gone when he entered the station. He had seen the
order in the book, and had waited the arrival of the west-bound
express, which arrived five minutes later. Had he not seen the red
light he would have gone on, and the trains would have met about two
miles east of the station.

The detectives tried to trace the two brutal savages, but did not
succeed.

Yes, as long as I live I shall remember that Christmas when I was
employed in the far west by the great Canadian Pacific Railway.

* * * * *

Le Loup-Garou.

The fear of it is killing me, Baptiste, for it is on my mind all the
time. Think of it: for seven long years he has neither been to
confession nor partaken of the blessed sacrament, and he is drinking
and growing wickeder every day. This is the last night of the seventh
year, and the curse may fall upon him now at any moment. She buried
her wrinkled, fear-stricken face in her thin trembling hands, and wept
as though her heart was breaking. "O Marie, blessed Virgin!" she
whispered, "save our son, our Pierre; let not the fate of the
loup-garou fall upon him." A thin stream of light shone through an
ancient crack in the old-fashioned box-stove, and fell caressingly
across the bowed head, making its silvery hair look pathetically thin.
The bent shoulders of the sorrowing mother shook convulsively.

Baptiste gazed with a troubled look at the bar of light on his wife's
head, and his heart went out to her as only a husband's can to a wife
who for half a century has borne with him the joys and trials of the
passing years. As he looked at the thin white hair, memory drifted
back to the time when it was as black as a raven's wing, and fell in
great glossy folds far below her waist. A tender smile stole into his
face as he remembered how, on account of the waywardness of the
beautiful hair and its rebellion against imprisonment, he had more
than once heard her chide it; yes, and at times when more than usually
arrogant, threaten to use the shears upon it. He observed, too, how
round her shoulders had grown, and noted many other signs of old age
which the glow from the stove made so cruelly apparent. It had taken
sixty years of life just to streak her hair with grey; but the past
seven years had remorselessly thinned and whitened it, and now not
even one black hair was to be seen. All these things and many more he
thought of as he gazed upon