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 

 Prev. P 28/255 next