eastbound passengers from Portland."

John Garfield Madison went into the smoking compartment of the car for a
cigar--several cigars--until Needley was reached some two hours later,
when the dusky attendant, as he pocketed Madison's dollar, set down his
little rubber-topped footstool with a flourish on a desolate and
forbidding-looking platform.

Madison was neither surprised nor dismayed--the parlor-car conductor,
the train conductor and the timetable had in no way attempted to deceive
him--he was only cold. He turned up his coat collar--and blew on his
kid-gloved fingers.

As far as he could see everything was white with a thin layer of
snow--he kicked some of it off his toes onto the unshovelled platform.
The landscape was disconsolately void of even a vestige of life, there
was not a sign of habitation--just woods of bare trees, except the firs,
whose green seemed out of place.

"I have arrived," said John Garfield Madison to himself, "at a
cemetery."

There was a very small station, and through the window he caught sight
of a harassed-faced, red-haired man. There was a thump, another one, a
very vicious one--and Madison stirred uneasily--the train, with its five
minutes' delinquency hanging over it, was already moving out, as his
trunks, from the baggage car ahead, shot unceremoniously to the
platform. Madison watched a man, the sole occupant of the platform apart
from himself, save the trunks from rolling under the wheels of the
train; then his eyes fastened on a rickety, two-seated wagon, drawn by a