of pity for him.
Then once more she withdrew, and staggering like one suffering from
vertigo--the eagle-hearted youth went out of the hall and down the
polished stairway like an outcast soul, descending from paradise into
hell.

That radiant singer was not for such as Black Mose.

CHAPTER XX

A DARK DAY WITH A GLOWING SUNSET

The clerk at the station window was not the kindly young man who had
received Harold's ticket for safe keeping. He knew nothing of it and
poked around for several minutes before finding it. After glancing
keenly at its date he threw it down and brusquely said:

"Time's out on this, my friend."

Harold looked at him sharply. "Oh, no, that can't be; it's a thirty-day
trip."

The agent grew irritable. "I know it is; it was good to the fifteenth;
this is the seventeenth; the ticket is worthless."

Harold took up the slip of paper and stared at it in bewilderment. The
agent was right; he had overstayed the limit and was without five
dollars in his pocket. He turned weak with a sudden sense of his
helplessness and the desolation of his surroundings. He was like a man
whose horse fails him on a desert. Taking a seat on a bench in a dark
corner of the waiting room he gave himself up to a study of the
situation. To be alone in the Needle Range was nothing to worry about,
but to be alone and without money in a city scared him.

For two hours he sat there, his thoughts milling like a herd of restless
cattle, turning aimlessly around and around in their tracks. He had
foolishly neglected his opportunity to escape, and the mountains became
each moment more beautiful as they swiftly receded into unattainable
distance. He had expected to be riding back into the safe and splendid
plains country, back to friends and familiar things, and had trusted to
the joy of his return to soften the despair of his second failure to
take Mary back with him.

It was a sorrowful thing to see the young eagle in somber dream, the man
of unhesitating action becoming introspective. Floods of intent business
men, gay young girls, and grizzled old farmers in groups of twos and
threes, streamed by, dimly shadowed in his reflective eyes. All these
people had purpose and reward in their lives; he alone was a stray, a
tramp, with no one but old Kintuck to draw him to any particular spot or
keep him there.

"I am outside of everything," he bitterly thought. "There is nothing for
me."

Yes, there was Cora and there w