the "Overland Flyer" made its
unscheduled stop behind a freight train which was blocking the track at
the blind siding at Coyote. Always a light sleeper, Ballard was aroused
by the jar and grind of the sudden brake-clipping; and after lying awake
and listening for some time, he got up and dressed and went forward to
see what had happened.

The accident was a box-car derailment, caused by a broken truck, and the
men of both train crews were at work trying to get the disabled car back
upon the steel and the track-blocking train out of the "Flyer's" way.
Inasmuch as such problems were acutely in his line, Ballard thought of
offering to help; but since there seemed to be no special need, he sat
down on the edge of the ditch-cutting to look on.

The night was picture fine; starlit, and with the silent wideness of the
great upland plain to give it immensity. The wind, which for the first
hundred miles of the westward flight had whistled shrilly in the car
ventilators, was now lulled to a whispering zephyr, pungent with the
subtle soil essence of the grass-land spring.

Ballard found a cigar and smoked it absently. His eyes followed the
toilings of the train crews prying and heaving under the derailed car,
with the yellow torch flares to pick them out; but his thoughts were far
afield, with his dinner-table companion to beckon them.

"Companion" was the word which fitted her better than any other. Ballard
had found few men, and still fewer women, completely companionable. Some
one has said that comradeship is the true test of affinity; and the
Kentuckian remembered with a keen appreciation of the truth of this
saying a summer fortnight spent at the Herbert Lassleys' cottage on the
North Shore, with Miss Craigmiles as one of his fellow-guests.

Margaret Lassley had been kind to him on that occasion, holding the
reins of chaperonage lightly. There had been sunny afternoons on the
breezy headlands, and blood-quickening mornings in Captain Tinkham's
schooner-rigged whale-boat, when the white horses were racing across the
outer reef and the water was too rough to tempt the other members of the
house-party.

He had monopolised Elsa Craigmiles crudely during those two weeks,
glorying in her beauty, in her bright mind, in her triumphant physical
fitness. He remembered how sturdily their comradeship had grown during
the uninterrupted fortnight. He had told her all there was to tell about
himself, and in return she had alternatel