was
a basket at her side in which he had a glimpse of broken bits of food;
and at her back, draped over the seat, was a heavy beaver-skin coat.

He rose to his feet with the intention of returning to the smoking
compartment in which he had left Father Roland. His movement seemed to
rouse the woman. Again her dark eyes met his own. They looked straight
up at him as he stood in the aisle, and he stopped. Her lips trembled.

"Are you ... acquainted ... between here and Lac Seul?" she asked.

Her voice had in it the same haunting mystery that he had seen in her
eyes, the same apprehension, the same hope, as though some curious and
indefinable instinct was telling her that in this stranger she was very
near to the thing which she was seeking.

"I am a stranger," he said. "This is the first time I have ever been in
this country."

She sank back, the look of hope in her face dying out like a passing
flash.

"I thank you," she murmured. "I thought perhaps you might know of a man
whom I am seeking--a man by the name of Michael O'Doone."

She did not expect him to speak again. She drew her heavy coat about her
and turned her face toward the window. There was nothing that he could
say, nothing that he could do, and he went back to Father Roland.

He was in the last coach when a sound came to him faintly. It was too
sharp for the wailing of the storm. Others heard it and grew suddenly
erect, with tense and listening faces. The young woman with the round
mouth gave a little gasp. A man pacing back and forth in the aisle
stopped as if at the point of a bayonet.

It came again.

The heavy-jowled man who had taken the adventure as a jest at first, and
who had rolled himself in his great coat like a hibernating woodchuck,
unloosed his voice in a rumble of joy.

"It's the whistle!" he announced. "The damned thing's coming at last!"

CHAPTER III

David came up quietly to the door of the smoking compartment where he
had left Father Roland. The Little Missioner was huddled in his corner
near the window. His head hung heavily forward and the shadows of his
black Stetson concealed his face. He was apparently asleep. His hands,
with their strangely developed joints and fingers, lay loosely upon his
knees. For fully half a minute David looked at him without moving or
making a sound, and as he looked, something warm and living seemed to
reach out from the lonely figure of the wilderness preacher that filled
him with a str