ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Printed in the United states
at
the country life press, Garden city, N. Y.

Copyright, 1916, by every week corporation, under the title “The girl beyond the trail”

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THE COURAGE OF MARGE O’DOONE

CHAPTER I

If you had stood there in the edge of the bleak spruce forest, with the wind moaning dismally through the twisting trees—­midnight of deep December—­the Transcontinental would have looked like a thing of fire; dull fire, glowing with a smouldering warmth, but of strange ghostliness and out of place.  It was a weird shadow, helpless and without motion, and black as the half-Arctic night save for the band of illumination that cut it in twain from the first coach to the last, with a space like an inky hyphen where the baggage car lay.  Out of the North came armies of snow-laden clouds that scudded just above the earth, and with these clouds came now and then a shrieking mockery of wind to taunt this stricken creation of man and the creatures it sheltered—­men and women who had begun to shiver, and whose tense white faces stared with increasing anxiety into the mysterious darkness of the night that hung like a sable curtain ten feet from the car windows.

For three hours those faces had peered out into the night.  Many of the prisoners in the snowbound coaches had enjoyed the experience somewhat at first, for there is pleasing and indefinable thrill to unexpected adventure, and this, for a brief spell, had been adventure de luxe.  There had been warmth and light, men’s laughter, women’s voices, and children’s play.  But the loudest jester among the men was now silent, huddled deep in his great coat; and the young woman who had clapped her hands in silly ecstasy when it was announced that the train was snowbound was weeping and shivering by turns.  It was cold—­so cold that the snow which came sweeping and swirling with the wind was like granite-dust; it clicked, clicked, clicked against the glass—­a bombardment of untold billions of infinitesimal projectiles fighting to break in.  In the edge of the forest it was probably forty degrees below zero.  Within the coaches there still remained some little warmth.  The burning lamps radiated it and the presence of many people added to it.  But it was cold, and growing colder.  A gray coating of congealed breath covered the car windows.  A few men had given their outer coats to women and children.  These men looked most frequently at their watches.  The adventure de luxe was becoming serious.

For the twentieth time a passing train-man was asked the same question.