LIPPINCOTT'S

MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

JULY, 1889.

TEN MINUTES TO TWELVE.

TE

CHAPTER I.

HEY all noticed him, even in the flurry of settling into their places, adjusting hand-luggage, and attending to the requirements of children. The conductor brought him in with great care, as one would handle fragile china, and settled him in a seat on the left-hand side. A brakeman followed with hand-luggage, and the two men bestirred themselves to make their charge comfortable, lowering the blind to keep the sun from his eyes, folding a railway-rug over his knees, and unlocking and turning the seat in front in case he should wish to put up his legs.

When the conductor and his satellite had betaken themselves to their various vocations in other parts of the train, the invalid turned his face to the window and his fellow-passengers took note of him. His height was medium, but seemed greater by reason of pallor and emaciation, his eyes had circles under them, and the droop of his figure indicated physical weakness. Evidently a man just out of a serious illness and hardly yet in a condition to travel. At least such was the dictum of the lady on the opposite side, given with emphasis to a girl on the

same seat.

"I wonder his people allow him to go about alone," she commented. "It seems positively brutal. He can hardly hold himself upright, and, I'm sure, the very look of him will keep me racked with anxiety as long as I sit here. He may give up the ghost at any moment."

The girl glanced across. "Perhaps he hasn't any people," she suggested, "or is on his way to them." Then she added, sympathetically, "Poor man! he does seem dreadfully ill. I wonder who he can be."

So did the elder lady,-so much, in fact, that, being of decided character and prone to get that which she wanted, were it only in

3

formation about her fellow-creatures, she put questions to the conductor the instant he returned to her vicinity. The facts elicited were few; but they served to deepen her interest and at the same time to divert her thoughts into a more personal channel. The sick man was a Dr. Royal and on his way to his people somewhere in the mountains of Virginia. He had been badly damaged in a New York railway-accident several weeks before, and, although he had escaped with life and limb, it would probably be many months before he would be his own man again. So much the conductor disclosed, in a burst of unofficial confidence, which he was made keenly to regret by having to combat womanly fears and prognostications, and also to pledge the honor of a railroadman that no accidents of any size or description had ever occurred in the past, or would be likely to occur in the future, to any train under his administration.

Meanwhile, Dr. Royal sat quietly in his place, with his knees well covered and his travelling-bag beside him. At intervals he would glance at his watch and administer to himself medicines from bottles which he manipulated with emaciated but steady fingers. From time to time the conductor would come to him with offers of service; but he appeared averse to giving trouble or making a stir in any way, and, on the whole, kept himself so quiet that the interest of the other passengers waned; although each new-comer would treat him to a stare of sympathetic, or stolid, curiosity according to each individual nature. And so the day wore on, eventless, into afternoon.

"Gibson's Landing !"

The brakeman dashed open the door of the rear car and sent his voice along the aisle. Nobody evinced other than passing interest, and it was apparent that the information concerned nobody present. The door closed with a bang, and the brakeman stepped back to the platform of the forward car. The engine gave a premonitory toot-toot, the train rolled forward a little way and then came to a stand-still. The invalid lifted himself and leaned on the window frame. Away in front he could see the dingy red round of the water-tank, and so satisfy himself as to the cause of the delay. He let his eyes wander listlessly here and there over the prospect spread out before him.

It presented the rather poverty-stricken aspect of the hill-country in December,-a stretch of hills in the background, clothed with forest for the most part, but diversified by cliffs and the jutting forth of granite boulders. At one point, nearly opposite the sick man's window, a red clay road circled and sidled down the hill-side to the river at its foot,-its objective point, apparently, a small ferry-house upon the bank. The embankment on which the track lay was lifted above the lowgrounds, so that the view was unobstructed to the river, the landing, and the hills beyond.

On the low-grounds the corn-stalks stood in straggling rows, upright, or inclined at various angles according to the wind's good pleasure; and the furrows, surcharged with overplus of moisture, showed long slushy puddles half hidden, half revealed, by tangles of cuckle-burrs, Spanish needles, and frost-bitten pumpkin- and bean-vines.

Dr. Royal looked about with dissatisfied recognition in his glance.

Six years had made no appreciable change in the aspect of Upper Virginia, he thought. The soil was as good,-witness the crop of weeds,the system of cultivation as inadequate, and the general look of things as peacefully thriftless, as ever. Had he been gifted with eyes in the back of his head and a focus through the opposite window his opinion would have been fully borne out by the dilapidation of the buildings near the station, the stretch of broomsedge- and sassafras-covered land around, and the joyous improvidence of a couple of negro boys, who, with apples to sell and a train-full of possible customers at hand, suffered themselves to be seduced into inattention to business by a dog-fight. Debarred from this additional evidence, there was still enough within the sick man's range of vision to produce a feeling of discouragement, which in a well man, fresh from different conditions, might have developed into exasperation.

"Even the roads are as bad as ever," he mused, glancing along the track which led across the low-grounds to the broad opening on the willow-fringed bank of the river.

In an instant his attention was arrested by a boat nearing the bank, -a long, unwieldy, flat-bottomed affair, presumably the ferry-boat,guided and propelled by a couple of negroes with long poles. In the end of the boat nearest the shore sat a man on horseback. His reins were gathered up, his body bent slightly forward, and his knees clamped the sides of his horse. Even from a distance there was an alertness, an eager precipitation, perceptible in his air and attitude.

"That fellow wants to make the train," quoth the passenger occupying the seat just behind Dr. Royal. "He can't, though,-without wings. They must be about through watering. Great Scott! what a jump! Standing jump, too. I'll bet a hat that's a fox-hunter."

"He'll get left!"

"No, he wont !"

"Here he comes,-pelting !"

"There goes the engine

confound it!"

These and other comments flew about the car, and every neck was

craned for a better view.

As the boat neared the bank the horseman had lifted his steed, touched him with the whip, and cleared the remaining feet of water at a bound. The horse staggered and slipped, his hind legs splashing into the water, but recovered himself with the vigor and address of an animal used to rough scrambling, and, laying back his ears and stretching his limbs, raced forward towards the station and the train. Excitement thrilled through the car. All the windows on the side next the river were open, and heads were thrust out with the faces set in one direction. Exclamations, conjectures, contradictions, and offers of bets passed freely: the passengers on the eventless side stood in the aisle and bent forward, striving to peer over the shoulders of their more fortunate companions. Fifty yards-thirty-fifteen-one more effort, and he would make it! In their eagerness the men hung far out of the windows and prepared to cheer.

The engine was getting up steam,-vibrating and twitching; the conductor, unwitting of the excitement, waved his hand to the engineer;

the cars were in motion: he had been left behind! he had missed it, after all!

By no means: there he stood on the rear platform, swaying with the motion of the train, and gazing back to where his horse stood, like a statue, in the middle of the track. How had he managed it? Everybody questioned everybody else, and a man who stood with his face flattened against the glass of the end door supplied the information that it had been "a regular circus."

As the train moved, the horse had bounded on the track close behind it, the rider had thrown himself from the saddle, caught the hand-rail, and, with a swerve and spring worthy of his quadrumanous ancestors, had landed himself on the step of the platform. It had been a reckless thing to do, rash and foolhardy; but the success of the feat appeared to modify its risk in the minds of the spectators and leave room for nothing but admiration of its agility. That is, everybody applauded except the inquisitive lady whose imagination had been set working along accident lines earlier in the day, who observed with asperity that "men might consider that sort of thing fine and spirited, but it was not. It was idiotic foolishness, and its legitimate reward should be a cell and a strait-jacket."

The horse, satisfied with his inspection of the retreating train, whinnied loudly, kicked up his heels, as one who exults in past prowess, and trotted down the embankment towards the stalk-field, oblivious alike of duty and the alluring calls and whistles of the negro advancing towards him from the ferry. The train rounded a bend, and the gentleman on the platform turned and tried the handle. of the car door. It was locked, as the passengers had discovered to their annoyance quite early in the action, and by the time the conductor came along and opened it matters had relapsed into a normal condition in the car, and the new-comer was allowed to find himself a seat without other comment than curious glances.

He was a muscular, broad-shouldered man, with a clean-shaven face, blue-gray eyes, a brown moustache, and close-cut hair. His clothes were trim and set to his figure, his linen was above reproach, and his hat the regulation structure with which fashion had crowned the male populace; but there was that about him, whether in the capable look of the hand and forearm, the alert glance and decisive movements, or all taken together, which caused the beholder, involuntarily, to strip from him civilized accessories, invest his sturdy frame with flannel and corduroy, clap a pistol in the rear pocket of his trousers, a horse between his knees, and set him on a prairie, with a lariat on the saddle-peak, a storm growling along the horizon, and an unruly bunch of cattle close at hand. The man's whole atmosphere suggested action, and ability to cope with physical forces.

The place he selected was directly behind that occupied by Dr. Royal, and he slipped out of his overcoat and threw it across the back of the seat with the gesture of a man who considers the garment a superfluity. As he settled himself, he opened his window, letting a rush of cold air into the car.

For half an hour the monotony was unbroken, save by the usual

trivialities of travel. Then the new-comer bent forward and scrutinized the man in front of him intently, muttered an exclamation that sounded like "The devil!" rose, and came swiftly round to the adjoining seat. Dr. Royal was huddled against the window, with his head drooped forward on his breast, apparently asleep; but when the stranger lifted him gently into a more comfortable position and turned his face to the light its pallor was ghastly and the eyes had a semi-conscious expression of pain.

"Has anybody got a pillow?—and another rug?" The young mau raised his voice and looked about him, reaching over at the same time for his own overcoat.

With instant helpfulness both articles were supplied, a woman depriving her sleeping child of its pillow. The tide of sympathetic interest set towards the sick man once more, and even the lady opposite rose superior to the natural exultation of a prophetess whom the event has justified, and tendered her shawl and a tiny silver flask with no thought save for the sufferer's relief. The conductor hurried forward followed by a brakeman with some bits of board, procured in the baggage-car, which they laid across the seats and heaped with rugs and overcoats, improvising as comfortable a resting-place as circumstances would permit. The train was a local, and had no sleeper attached. The conductor seemed troubled, and repeated the story he had given earlier in the day.

"The fellow has no business travelling," he averred, impatiently. "He's been badly smashed up, and is only just out of the hospital. He seems in the devil of a hurry to get where he's going to. A brother Mason handed him over to me this morning, with orders to look after him and help him all I could. He seems to need taking care of, if ever a man did."

"Is he a Mason?" questioned a by-stander, then added, superfluously, "How do you know he is?"

"How do you know I'm a man?" was the sharp counter-query. The passenger stared.

"The signs point that way, don't they?" pursued the conductor, elaborating from sheer vexation with the other's inconsequence. "Well, I'm a Mason myself, and that gentleman was given into my charge by a Mason, as I said before,-and he's got the badge of the order pinned on his breast. That's as good evidence as a beard and trousers, I reckon. It passed, anyway."

"

There was a smile at the questioner's expense. The young man bending over the invalid moved his coat aside and glanced at the badge on his breast. He had been working away with professional skill and promptitude, and his instant assumption of authority and responsibility, as well as his evident ability to cope with the situation, suggested in the minds of the other passengers a surmise that he was practising within his own bailiwick even before an abrupt announcement changed conjecture into certainty.

"We all thought" the lady across the aisle commenced, then paused, smiling.

"That I was a ranchman? Everybody makes that mistake, madam.