TRUCE
The Eastern Express, mantled in a seething whirl of snow, but still
maintaining very nearly its scheduled time and even regaining a few
lost minutes from hour to hour as, now well past the middle of the
State, it sped on across the flatter country in its approach to the
mountains, proceeded monotonously through the afternoon. Eaton watched
the chill of the snow battle against the warmth of the double windows
on the windward side of the car, until finally it conquered and the
windows became--as he knew the rest of the outside of the cars must
have been long before--merely a wall of white. This coating,
thickening steadily with the increasing severity of the storm as they
approached the Rockies, dimmed the afternoon daylight within the car to
dusk.
Presently all became black outside the windows, and the passengers from
the rear cars filed forward to the dining car and then back to their
places again. Eaton took care to avoid the Dorne party in the diner.
Soon the porter began making up the berths to be occupied that night;
but as yet no one was retiring. The train was to reach Spokane late in
the evening; there would be a stop there for half an hour; and after
the long day on the train, every one seemed to be waiting up for a walk
about the station before going to bed. But as the train slowed, and
with a sudden diminishing of the clatter of the fishplates under its
wheels and of the puffings of exhausted steam, slipped into the lighted
trainsheds at the city, Eaton sat for some minutes in thought. Then he
dragged his overcoat down from its hook, buttoned it tightly about his
throat, pulled his traveling cap down on his head and left the car.
All along the train, vestibule doors of the Pullmans had been opened,
and the passengers were getting out, while a few others, snow-covered
and with hand-luggage, came to board the train. Eaton, turning to
survey the sleet-shrouded car he had left, found himself face to face
with Miss Dorne, standing alone upon the station platform.
Her piquant, beautiful face was half hidden in the collar of the great
fur coat she had worn on boarding the train, and her cheeks were ruddy
with the bite of the crisp air.
"You see before you a castaway," she volunteered, smiling.
He felt it necessary to take the same tone. "A castaway?" he
questioned. "Cast away by whom?"
"By Mr. Avery, if you must know, though your implication that anybody
should have cast me away--anybody at all, Mr. Eaton--is unpleasant."
"There was no implication; it was simply inquiry."
"You should have put it, then, in some other form; you should have
asked how I came to be in so surprising a position."
"'How,' in this part of the country, Miss Dorne, is not regarded as a
question, but merely as a form of salutation," he bantered. "It was
formerly employed by the Indian aborigines inhabiting these parts, who
exchanged 'How's' when passing each other on the road. If I had said
'How,' you might simply have replied 'How,' and I should have been
under the necessity of considering the incident closed."
She laughed. "You do not wish it to be closed."
"Not till I know more about it."
"Very well; you shall know more. Mr. Avery brought me out to take a
walk. He remembered, after bringing me as far as this, that we had not
asked my father whether he had any message to be sent from here or any
commission to execute; so he went back to find out. I have now waited
so many minutes that I feel sure it is my father who has detained him.
The imperfectly concealed meaning of what I am telling you is that I
consider that Mr. Avery, by his delay, has forfeited his right. The
further implication--for _I_ do imply things, Mr. Eaton--is that you
cannot very well avoid offering to take the post of duty he has
abandoned."
"You mean walk with you?"
"I do."
He slipped his hand inside her arm, sustaining her slight, active body
against the wind which blew strongly through the station and scattered
over them snow-flakes blown from the roofs of the cars, as they walked
forward along the train. Her manner had told him that she meant to
ignore her resentment of the morning; but as, turning, they commenced
to walk briskly up and down the platform, he found he was not wholly
right in this.
"You must admit, Mr. Eaton, that I am treating you very well."
"In pardoning an offense where no offense was meant?"
"It is partly that--that I realized no offense was meant. Partly it is
because I do not pass judgment on things I do not understand. I could
imagine no possible reason for your very peculiar refusal."
"Not even that I might be perhaps the sort of person who ought not to
be introduced into your party in quite that way?"
"That least of all. Persons of that sort do not admit themselves to be
such; and if I have lived for twen--I shall not tell you just how many
years--the sort of life I have been obliged to live almost since I was
born, without learning to judge men in that respect, I must have failed
to use my opportunities."
"Thank you," he returned quietly; then, as he recollected his
instinctive prejudice against Avery: "However, I am not so sure."
She plainly waited for him to go on, but he pretended to be concerned
wholly with guiding her along the platform.
"Mr. Eaton!"
"Yes."
"Do you know that you are a most peculiar man?"
"Exactly in what way, Miss Dorne?"
"In this: The ordinary man, when a woman shows any curiosity about
himself, answers with a fullness and particularity and eagerness which
seems to say, 'At last you have found a subject which interests me!'"
"Does he?"
"Is that the only reply you care to make?"
"I can think of none more adequate."
"Meaning that after my altogether too open display of curiosity
regarding you, I can still do nothing better than guess, without any
expectation that you, on your part, will deign to tell me whether I am
right or wrong. Very well; my first guess is that you have not done
much walking with young women on station platforms--certainly not much
of late."
"I'll try to do better, if you'll tell me how you know that?"
"You do very well. I was not criticising you, and I don't have to tell
why. Ask no questions; it is a clairvoyant diviner who is speaking."
"Divinity?"
"Diviner only. My second guess is that you have been abroad in far
lands."
"My railroad ticket showed as much as that."
"Pardon me, if it seriously injures your self-esteem; but I was not
sufficiently interested in you when you came aboard the train, to
observe your ticket. What I know is divined from the exceedingly odd
and reminiscent way in which you look at all things about you--at this
train, this station, the people who pass."
"You find nothing reminiscent, I suppose, in the way I look at you?"
"You do yourself injustice. You do not look at me at all, so I cannot
tell; but there could hardly be any reminiscence extending beyond this
morning, since you never saw me before then."
"No; this is all fresh experience."
"I hope it is not displeasing. My doubt concerning your evidently
rather long absence abroad is as to whether you went away to get or to
forget."
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand."
"Those are the two reasons for which young men go to Asia, are they
not?--to get something or to forget something. At least, so I have
been given to understand. Shall I go on?"
"Go on guessing, you mean? I don't seem able to prevent it."
"Then my third guess is this--and you know no one is ever allowed more
than three guesses." She hesitated; when she went on, she had entirely
dropped her tone of banter. "I guess, Mr. Eaton, that you have been--I
think, are still--going through some terrible experience which has
endured for a very long time--perhaps even for years--and has nearly
made of you and perhaps even yet may make of you something far
different and--and something far less pleasing than you--you must have
been before. There! I have transcended all bounds, said everything I
should not have said, and left unsaid all the conventional things which
are all that our short acquaintance could have allowed. Forgive
me--because I'm not sorry."
He made no answer. They walked as far as the rear of the train, turned
and came back before she spoke again:
"What is it they are doing to the front of our train, Mr. Eaton?"
He looked. "They are putting a plow on the engine."
"Oh!"
"That seems to be only the ordinary push-plow, but if what I have been
overhearing is correct, the railroad people are preparing to give you
one of the minor exhibitions of that everyday courage of which you
spoke this morning, Miss Dorne."
"In what particular way?"
"When we get across the Idaho line and into the mountains, you are to
ride behind a double-header driving a rotary snow-plow."
"A double-header? You mean two locomotives?"
"Yes; the preparation is warrant that what is ahead of us in the way of
travel will fully come up to anything you may have been led to expect."
They stood a minute watching the trainmen; as they turned, his gaze
went past her to the rear cars. "Also," he added, "Mr. Avery, with his
usual gracious pleasure at my being in your company, is hailing you
from the platform of your car."
She looked up at Eaton sharply, seemed about to speak, and then checked
what was upon her tongue. "You are going into your own car?" She held
out to him her small gloved hand. "Good-by, then--until we see one
another again."
"Good night, Miss Dorne."
He took her hand and retaining it hardly the fraction of an instant,
let it go. Was it her friendship she had been offering him? Men use
badinage without respect to what their actual feelings may be;
women--some memory from the past in which he had known such girls as
this, seemed to recall--use it most frequently when their feelings,
consciously or unconsciously, are drawing toward a man.
Eaton now went into the men's compartment of his car, where he sat
smoking till after the train was under way again. The porter looked in
upon him there to ask if he wished his berth made up now; Eaton nodded
assent, and fifteen minutes later, dropping the cold end of his cigar
and going out into the car, he found the berth ready for him. "D.
S.'s" section, also made up but with the curtains folded back
displaying the bedding within, was unoccupied; jerkings of the
curtains, and voices and giggling in the two berths at the end of the
car, showed that Amy and Constance were getting into bed; the
Englishman was wide awake in plain determination not to go to bed until
his accustomed Nottingham hour. Eaton, drawing his curtains together
and buttoning them from the inside, undressed and went to bed. A
half-hour later the passage of some one through the aisle and the
sudden dimming of the crack of light which showed above the curtains
told him that the lights in the car had been turned down. Eaton closed
his eyes, but sleep was far from him.
Presently he began to feel the train beginning to labor with the
increasing grade and the deepening snow. It was well across the State
line and into Idaho; it was nearing the mountains, and the weather was
getting colder and the storm more severe. Eaton lifted the curtain
from the window beside him and leaned on one elbow to look out. The
train was running through a bleak, white desolation; no light and no
sign of habitation showed anywhere. Eaton lay staring out, and now the
bleak world about him seemed to assume toward him a cruel and merciless
aspect. The events of the day ran through his mind again with sinister
suggestion. He had taken that train for a certain definite, dangerous
purpose which required his remaining as obscure and as inconspicuous as
possible; yet already he had been singled out for attention. So far,
he was sure, he had received no more than that--attention, curiosity
concerning him. He had not suffered recognition; but that might come
at any moment. Could he risk longer waiting to act?
He dropped on his back upon the bed and lay with his hands clasped
under his head, his eyes staring up at the roof of the car.
In the card-room of the observation car, playing and conversation still
went on for a time; then it diminished as one by one the passengers
went away to bed. Connery, looking into this car, found it empty and
the porter cleaning up; he slowly passed on forward through the train,
stopping momentarily in the rear Pullman opposite the berth of the
passenger whom President Jarvis had commended to his care. His
scrutiny of the car told him all was correct here; the even breathing
within the berth assured him the passenger slept.
Connery went on through to the next car and paused again outside the
berth occupied by Eaton. He had watched Eaton all day with results
that still he was debating with himself; he had found in a newspaper
the description of the man who had waited at Warden's, and he reread
it, comparing it with Eaton. It perfectly confirmed Connery's first
impression; but the more Connery had seen of Eaton, and the more he had
thought over him during the day, the more the conductor had become
satisfied that either Eaton was not the man described or, if he was,
there was no harm to come from it. After all, was not all that could
be said against Eaton--if he was the man--simply that he had not
appeared to state why Warden was befriending him? Was it not possible
that he was serving Warden in some way by not appearing? Certainly Mr.
Dorne, who was the man most on the train to be considered, had
satisfied himself that Eaton was fit for an acquaintance; Connery had
seen what was almost a friendship, apparently, spring up between Eaton
and Dorne's daughter during the day.
The conductor went on, his shoulders brushing the buttoned curtains on
both sides of the narrow aisle. Except for the presence of the
passenger in the rear sleeper, this inspection was to the conductor the
uttermost of the commonplace; in its monotonous familiarity he had
never felt any strangeness in this abrupt and intimate bringing
together of people who never had seen one another before, who after
these few days of travel together, might probably never see one another
again, but who now slept separated from one another and from the
persons passing through the cars by no greater protection than these
curtains designed only to shield them from the light and from each
other's eyes. He felt no strangeness in this now. He merely assured
himself by his scrutiny that within his train all was right. Outside--
Connery was not so sure of that; rather, he had been becoming more
certain hour by hour all through the evening, that they were going to
have great difficulty in getting the train through. Though he knew by
President Jarvis' note that the officials of the road must be watching
the progress of this especial train with particular interest, he had
received no train-orders from the west for several hours. His inquiry
at the last stop had told him the reason for this; the telegraph wires
to the west had gone down. To the east, communication was still open,
but how long it would remain so he could not guess. Here in the deep
heart of the great mountains--they had passed the Idaho boundary-line
into Montana--they were getting the full effect of the storm; their
progress, increasingly slow, was broken by stops which were becoming
more frequent and longer as they struggled on. As now they fought
their way slower and slower up a grade, and barely topping it,
descended the opposite slope at greater speed as the momentum of the
train was added to the engine-power, Connery's mind went back to the
second sleeper with its single passenger, and he spoke to the Pullman
conductor, who nodded and went toward that car. The weather had
prevented the expected increase of their number of passengers at
Spokane; only a few had got aboard there; there were worse grades
ahead, in climbing which every pound of weight would count; so
Connery--in the absence of orders and with Jarvis' note in his
pocket--had resolved to drop the second sleeper.
At Fracroft--the station where he was to exchange the ordinary plow
which so far had sufficed, and couple on the "rotary" to fight the
mountain drifts ahead--he swung himself down from the train, looked in
at the telegraph office and then went forward to the two giant
locomotives, on whose sweating, monstrous backs the snow, suddenly
visible in the haze of their lights, melted as it fell. He waited on
the station platform while the second sleeper was cut out and the train
made up again. Then, as they started, he swung aboard and in the
brightly lighted men's compartment of the first Pullman checked up his
report-sheets with a stub of pencil. They had stopped again, he
noticed; now they were climbing a grade, more easily because of the
decrease of weight; now a trestle rumbled under the wheels, telling him
just where they were. Next was the powerful, steady push against
opposition--the rotary was cutting its way through a drift.
Again they stopped--once more went on. Connery, having put his papers
into his pocket, dozed, awoke, dozed again. The snow was certainly
heavy, and the storm had piled it up across the cuts in great drifts
which kept the rotary struggling almost constantly now. The progress
of the train halted again and again; several times it backed, charged
forward again--only to stop, back and charge again and then go on. But
this did not disturb Connery. Then something went wrong. All at once
he found himself, by a trainman's instinctive and automatic action,
upon his feet; for the shock had been so slight as barely to be felt,
far too slight certainly to have awakened any of the sleeping
passengers in their berths. He went to the door of the car, lifted the
platform stop, threw open the door of the vestibule and hanging by one
hand to the rail, swung himself out from the side of the car to look
ahead. He saw the forward one of the two locomotives wrapped in clouds
of steam, and men arm-deep in snow wallowing forward to the rotary
still further to the front, and the sight confirmed fully his
apprehension that this halt was more important and likely to last much
longer than those that had gone before.