maha station there was a fresh influx of passengers for the
Denver car, and to Ballard's dismay they appeared at the first hasty
glance to be all women.

"O good Lord!" he ejaculated; and finding his pipe retreated
precipitately in the direction of the smoking-compartment, vaguely
hoping to dodge the inevitable.

At the turn around the corner of the linen locker he glanced back. Two
or three figures in the group of late comers might have asked for
recognition if he had looked fairly at them; but he had eyes for only
one: a modish young woman in a veiled hat and a shapeless gray box
travelling-coat, who was evidently trying to explain something to the
Pullman conductor.

"Jove!" he exclaimed; "if I weren't absolutely certain that Elsa
Craigmiles is half-way across the Atlantic with the Lassleys--but she
is; and if she were not, she wouldn't be here, doing the 'personally
conducted' for that mob." And he went on to smoke.

It was a very short time afterward that an apologetic Pullman conductor
found him, and the inevitable came to pass.

"This is Mr. Ballard, I believe?"

A nod, and an uphanding of tickets.

"Thank you. I don't like to discommode you, Mr. Ballard; but--er--you
have an entire section, and----"

"I know," said Ballard crisply. "The lady got on the wrong train, or she
bought the wrong kind of ticket, or she took chances on finding the
good-natured fellow who would give up his berth and go hang himself on a
clothes-hook in the vestibule. I have been there before, but I have not
yet learned how to say 'No.' Fix it up any way you please, only don't
give me an upper over a flat-wheeled truck, if you can help it."

An hour later the dining-car dinner was announced; and Ballard, who had
been poring over a set of the Arcadian maps and profiles and a thick
packet of documents mailed to intercept him at Chicago, brought up the
rear of the outgoing group from the Denver car.

In the vestibule of the diner he found the steward wrestling suavely
with a late contingent of hungry ones, and explaining that the tables
were all temporarily full. Ballard had broad shoulders and the Kentucky
stature to match them. Looking over the heads of the others, he marked,
at the farther end of the car, a table for two, with one vacant place.

"I beg your pardon--there is only one of me," he cut in; and the steward
let him pass. When he had dodged the laden waiters and was taking the
vacant seat he found himself confronting