vel beginning, westbound, and the Lalla Rookh sleeper
being deadheaded to the coast on a special charter for an O. and O.
steamer party; at least, that was all the porter knew about its
destination, and he knew more than anyone else.

At McCloud, where the St. Louis connection is made, Number One sets out
a diner and picks up a Portland sleeper--so it happened that the Lalla
Rookh, hind car to McCloud, afterward lay ahead of the St. Louis car,
and the trainmen passed, as occasion required, through it--lighted down
the gloomy aisle by a single Pintsch burner, choked to an all-night
dimness.

But on the night of October 3d, which was a sloppy night in the
mountains, there was not a great deal to take anybody back through the
Lalla Rookh. Even the porter of the dead car deserted his official
corpse, and after Number One pulled out of Medicine Bend and stuck her
slim, aristocratic nose fairly into the big ranges the Lalla Rookh was
left as dead as a stringer to herself and her reflections--reflections
of brilliant aisles and staterooms inviting with softened lights, shed
on couples that resented intrusion; of sections bright with lovely
faces and decks ringing with talk and laughter; of ventilators singing
of sunshine within, and of night and stars and waste without--for the
Lalla Rookh carried only the best people, and after the overland voyage
on her tempered springs and her yielding cushions they felt an
affection for her. When the Lalla Rookh lived she lived; but to-night
she was dead.

This night the pretty car sped over the range a Cinderella deserted,
her linen stored and checked in her closets, her pillows bunked in her
seats, and her curtains folded in her uppers, save and except in one
single instance--Section Eleven, to conform to certain deeply held
ideas of the porter, Raz Brown, as to what might and might not
constitute a hoodoo, was made up. Raz Brown did not play much: he
could not and hold his job; but when he did play he played eleven
always whether it fell between seven, twenty-seven, or four,
forty-four. And whenever Raz Brown deadheaded a car through, he always
made up section eleven, and laid the hoodoo struggling but helpless
under the chilly linen sheets of the lower berth.

Glover had spent the day without incident or excitement on the Wind
River branches, and the evening had gone, while waiting to take a train
west to Medicine Bend, in figuring estimates at the agent's desk in
Wind River s