When she was deposited safely inside, and Mulrady had climbed to
the box beside the driver, the latter remarked, curtly,--

"Ye gave me a right smart skeer, a minit ago, stranger."

"Ez how?"

"Well, about three years ago, I was comin' down this yer grade, at
just this time, and sittin' right on that stone, in just your
attitude, was a man about your build and years. I pulled up to let
him in, when, darn my skin! if he ever moved, but sorter looked at
me without speakin'. I called to him, and he never answered, 'cept
with that idiotic stare. I then let him have my opinion of him, in
mighty strong English, and drove off, leavin' him there. The next
morning, when I came by on the up-trip, darn my skin! if he wasn't
thar, but lyin' all of a heap on the boulder. Jim drops down and
picks him up. Doctor Duchesne, ez was along, allowst it was a
played-out prospector, with a big case of paralysis, and we
expressed him through to the County Hospital, like so much dead
freight. I've allus been kinder superstitious about passin' that
rock, and when I saw you jist now, sittin' thar, dazed like, with
your head down like the other chap, it rather threw me off my
centre."

In the inexplicable and half-superstitious uneasiness that this
coincidence awakened in Mulrady's unimaginative mind, he was almost
on the point of disclosing his good fortune to the driver, in order
to prove how preposterous was the parallel, but checked himself in
time.