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 reentered 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.