keman, a country
editor, and the detective sent out to spot the crew, played high five.
The three or four passengers in the sleeper were not asleep. They were
sitting silently at the curtained windows and occasionally casting
anxious glances at the Pullman conductor who seemed to be expecting
something to happen. Where were all the people who used to travel by
this splendid train? The road was now considered, by most people, as
unsafe and the people were going round it. Public opinion, at the
beginning of the strike, was about equally divided between the men and
the company. Now and then a reckless striker or sympathizer would blow
up a building, dope a locomotive or ditch a train, and the stock of the
strikers would go down in the estimation of the public. Burlington stock
was falling rapidly--the property was being wrecked.

On nearly every side track could be seen two or three dead engines that
had been ruined and abandoned by amateur engine-drivers, and now and
then at way-stations the smouldering ruins of a freight train, whose
blackened skeleton still clung to the warped and twisted track. At every
station great crowds of people blocked the platforms, for the Limited
had not been able to leave Chicago for more than a month. The engineer
had scarcely touched the whistle, deeming it safer to slip quietly
through the night, and the light train was now speeding noiselessly over
the snow-muffled earth. They had left Chicago two hours late, and as
they had a clear track, so far as other trains were concerned, the
young driver was letting her go regardless of danger. At any moment they
might expect to be blown into eternity, and it was just as safe at
seventy miles an hour as at seventeen.

Besides, George Cowels was desperate. For five long years he had fired
this run with the same locomotive. He knew all her tricks and whims, her
speed and power, and the road was as familiar to him as was his mother's
face. He knew where the "old man" used to cut her back and ease off on
the down grades. He knew that he ought to do the same, but he did not.
"Let her roll," he would say to himself; and she did roll, and with
every swing the bell sounded a single note, low and mournful, like a
church bell tolling for the dead. It seemed to the unhappy engineer that
it tolled for him, for that day he had died to all his friends.

Although he had only been out a little over an hour now, he knew that in
that hour the story of his desertio