you."

The whole search did not take more than twenty minutes. The railway-men
went back at a quick pace. Trenholme went with them, insisting only that
they should look at the track of the stranger's snow-shoes, and admit
that it was not his own track.

The French engineer was sufficiently superstitious to lend a half belief
to the idea that the place was haunted, and that was his reason for
haste. The electrician was only sorry that so much time had been purely
wasted; that was his reason. He was a middle-aged man, spare, quick, and
impatient, but he looked at Alec Trenholme in the light of the engine
lamp, when they came up to it, with some kindly interest.

"I say," he went on again, "don't you go on staying here alone--a
good-looking fellow like you. You don't look to me like a chap to have
fancies if you weren't mewed up alone."

As Trenholme saw the car carried from him, saw the faces and forms of
the men who stood at its door disappear in the darkness, and watched the
red light at its back move slowly on, leaving a lengthening road of
black rails behind it, he felt more mortified at the thought of the
telegraph man's compassion than he cared to own, even to himself.

He went out again, and hunted with a lantern till he found a track
leading far into the wood in the opposite direction from his house.
This, then, was the way the old man had gone. He followed the track for
a mile, but never came within sight or sound of the man who made it.

At last it joined the railway line, and where the snow was rubbed smooth