lifted out of the blackness of the
night into the streaming glare of the headlights. Very carefully he
was swung down to the mattresses piled on the track, and, before all
that looked and waited, a woman knelt and kissed his sunken eyes. Not
then did the men, dim in the circle about them, show what they felt,
though they knew, to the meanest trackhand, all it meant; not when,
after a bare moment of hesitation, Gertrude's father knelt opposite on
the mattress-pile, did they break their silence, though they shrewdly
guessed what that meant.

But when Glover pulled together his disordered members and at
Gertrude's side walked without help to the step of the car, the murmur
broke into a cheer that rang from Pilot to Glen Tarn.

"It was more than half my fault," he breathed to her, after his broken
arms had been set and the long gash on his head stitched. "I need not
have lost my balance if I had kept my head. Gertrude, I may as well
admit it--I'm a coward since I've begun to love you. I've never told
you how I saw your face once between the curtains of an empty sleeper.
But it came back to me just as Dancing's shoulder slipped--that's why I
went. I'm done forever with long chances." And she, silent, tried
only to quiet him while the car moved down the gap bearing them from
Pilot together.

"Do you know what day to-morrow is?" Gertrude was opening a box of
flowers that Solomon had brought from the express-office; Glover,
plastered with bandages, was standing before the grate fire in the
hotel parlor.

"To-morrow?" he echoed. "Sunday."

"Sunday! Why do you always guess Sunday when I ask you what day it is?"

"You would think every day Sunday if you had had as good a time as I
have for six weeks."

"The doctor does say you're doing beautifully. I asked him yesterday
how soon you would be well and he said you never had been so well since
he knew you. But what is to-morrow?"

"Thanksgiving."

"Thanksgiving, indeed! Yes, every day is Thanksgiving for us. But
it's not especially _that_."

"Christmas."

"Nonsense! To-morrow is the second anniversary of our engagement."

"My Lord, Gertrude, have we been engaged two years? Why, at that rate
I can't possibly marry you till I'm forty-four."

"It isn't two years, it's two months. And to-night they have their
memorial services for poor Paddy McGraw. And, do you know, your friend
Mr. Foley has our engine now? Yes; he came up the other day to ask
abo