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