hungry nor cold, for there 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 strangely new feeling of companionship. Again he made no effort to analyze the change in himself; he accepted it as one of the two or three inexplicable phenomena this night and the storm had produced for him, and was chiefly concerned in the fact that he was no longer oppressed by that torment of aloneness which had been a part of his nights and days for so many months. He was about to speak when he made up his mind not to disturb the other. So certain was he that Father Roland was asleep that he drew away from the door on the tips of his toes and reëntered the coach.
He did not stop in the first or second car, though there were plenty of empty seats and people were rousing themselves into more cheerful activity. He passed through one and then the other to the third coach, and sat down when he came to the seat he had formerly occupied. He did not immediately look at the woman across the aisle. He did not want her to suspect that he had come back for that purpose. When his eyes did seek her in a casual sort of way he was disappointed.
She was almost covered in her coat. He caught only the gleam of her thick, dark hair, and the shape of one slim hand, white as paper in the lampglow. He knew that she was not asleep, for he saw her shoulders move, and the hand shifted its position to hold the coat closer about her. The whistling of the approaching engine, which could be heard distinctly now, had no apparent effect on her. For ten minutes he sat staring at all he could see of her—the dark glow of her hair and the one ghostly white hand. He moved, he shuffled his feet, he coughed; he made sure she knew he was there, but she did not look up. He was sorry that he had not brought Father Roland with him in the first place, for he was certain that if the Little Missioner had seen the grief and the despair in her eyes—the hope almost burned out—he would have gone to her and said things which he had found it impossible to say when the opportunity had come to him. He rose again from his seat as the powerful snow-engine and its consort coupled on to the train. The shock almost flung him off his feet. Even then she did not raise her head.
A second time he returned to the smoking compartment.
Father Roland was no longer huddled down in his corner. He was on his feet, his hands thrust deep down into his trousers pockets, and he was whistling softly as David came in. His hat lay on the seat. It was the first time David had seen his round, rugged, weather-reddened face without the big Stetson. He looked younger and yet older; his face, as David saw it there in the lampglow, had something in the ruddy glow and deeply lined strength of it that was almost youthful. But his thick, shaggy hair was very gray. The train had begun to move. He turned to the window for a moment, and then looked at David.
"We are under way," he said. "Very soon I will be getting off."
David sat down.
"It is some distance beyond the divisional point ahead—this cabin where you get off?" he asked.
"Yes, twenty or twenty-five miles. There is nothing but a cabin and two or three log outbuildings there—where Thoreau, the Frenchman, has his fox pens, as I told you. It is not a regular stop, but the train will slow down to throw off my dunnage and give me an easy jump. My dogs and Indian are with Thoreau."
"And from there—from Thoreau's—it is a long distance to the place you call home?"
The Little Missioner rubbed his hands in a queer rasping way. The movement of those rugged hands and the curious, chuckling laugh that accompanied it, radiated a sort of cheer. They were expressions of more than satisfaction. "It's a great many miles to my own cabin, but it's home—all home—after I get into the forests. My cabin is at the lower end of God's Lake, three hundred miles by dogs and sledge from Thoreau's—three hundred miles as straight north as a niskuk flies."
"A niskuk?" said David.
"Yes—a gray goose."
"Don't you have crows?"
"A few; but they're as crooked in flight as they are in morals. They're scavengers, and they hang down pretty close to the line of rail—close to civilization, where there's a lot of scavenging to be done, you know."
For the second time that night David found a laugh on his lips.
"Then—you don't like civilization?"
"My heart is in the Northland," replied Father Roland, and David saw a sudden change in the other's face, a dying out of the light in his eyes, a tenseness that came and went like a flash at the corners of his mouth. In that same moment he saw the Missioner's hand tighten, and the fingers knot themselves curiously and then slowly relax.
One of these hands dropped on David's shoulder, and Father Roland became the questioner.
"You have been thinking, since you left me a little while ago?" he asked.
"Yes. I came back. But you were asleep."
"I
