and forth below
Eaton's window. He was a guard stationed to prevent any escape while
the car was motionless in the yard.

Eaton lay for a long time, listening for other sounds and wondering
what was occurring--or had occurred--at the other end of his car.
Toward morning he fell asleep.

CHAPTER XI

PUBLICITY NOT WANTED

"Basil Santoine dying! Blind Millionaire lawyer taken ill on train!"

The alarm of the cry came to answer Eaton's question early the next
morning. As he started up in his berth, he shook himself into
realization that the shouts were not merely part of an evil dream; some
one was repeating the cry outside the car window. He threw up the
curtain and saw a vagrant newsboy, evidently passing through the
railroad yards to sell to the trainmen. Eaton's guard outside his
window was not then in sight; so Eaton lifted his window from the
screen, removed that, and hailing the boy, put out his hand for a
paper. He took it before he recalled that he had not even a cent; but
he looked for his knife in his trousers pocket and tossed it out to the
boy with the inquiry: "How'll that do?"

The boy gaped, picked it up, grinned and scampered off. Eaton spread
the news-sheet before him and swiftly scanned the lines for information
as to the fate of the man who, for four days, had been lying only forty
feet away from him at the other end of a Pullman car.

The paper--a Minneapolis one--blared at him that Santoine's condition
was very low and becoming rapidly worse. But below, under a Montana
date-line, Eaton saw it proclaimed that the blind millionaire was
merely sick; there was no suggestion anywhere of an attack. The paper
stated only that Basil Santoine, returning from Seattle with his
daughter and his secretary, Donald Avery, had been taken seriously ill
upon a train which had been stalled for two days in the snow in
Montana. The passenger from whom the information had been gained had
heard that the malady was appendicitis, but he believed that was merely
given out to cover some complication which had required surgical
treatment on the train. He was definite as regarded the seriousness of
Mr. Santoine's illness and described the measures taken to insure his
quiet. The railroad officials refused, significantly, to make a
statement regarding Mr. Santoine's present condition. There was
complete absence of any suggestion of violence having been done; and
also, Eaton found, there was no word given