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At the front end of the mail car Crosby and his prisoner halted. Every one knows that the head end of the coach just back of the engine tender is “blind.” That is, there is no door leading to the interior, and one must stand outside on the narrow platform if, perchance, he is there when the train starts. As the east-bound train pulled in from the bridge, coming to a stop on the track beyond the west-bound train, Crosby commanded his erstwhile captor to climb aboard the blind end of the mail coach.

“Geewhillikers, don’t make me do that,” groaned the unhappy Brown.

“Get aboard and don’t argue. You can come back to-morrow, you know, and you’re perfectly safe if you stay awake and don’t roll off. Hurry up! If you try to jump off before you reach the bridge I’ll shoot.”

A moment later the train pulled into the bridge and Crosby hurried back to his anxious companion. Brown was on his way to a station forty miles west, and he did not dare risk jumping off. By the time the train reached the far end of the bridge it was running forty miles an hour.

“Where is he?” she cried in alarm as he rushed with her across the intervening space to the coveted “east-bound.”

“I’ll tell you all about it when we get inside this train,” he answered. “I think Brown is where he can’t telegraph to head us off any place along the line, and if we once get into Indiana we are comparatively safe. Up you go!” and he lifted her up the car steps.

“Safe,” she sighed, as they dropped into a seat in a coach.

“I’m ashamed to mention it, my dear accomplice, but are you quite sure you have your purse with you? With the usual luck of a common thief, I am penniless.”

“Penniless because you gave your fortune to the cause of freedom,” she supplemented, fumbling in her chatelaine bag for her purse. “Here it is. The contents are yours until the end of our romance.”

The conductor took fare from him to Lafayette and informed the mud- covered gentleman that he could get a train from that city to Chicago at 2:30 in the morning.

“We’re all right now,” said Crosby after the conductor had passed on. “You are tired, little woman. Lie back and go to sleep. The rough part of the adventure is almost over.” He secured a pillow for her, and she was soon resting as comfortably as it was possible in the day coach of a passenger train.

For many minutes he sat beside her, his eyes resting on the beautiful tired face with its closed eyes, long lashes, pensive mouth, and its frame of dark hair, disarranged and wild.

“It’s strange,” he thought, almost aloud, “how suddenly it comes to a fellow. Twelve hours ago I was as free as a bird in the air, and now–“

Just then her eyes opened widely with a start, as if she had suddenly come from a rather terrifying dream. They looked squarely into his, and he felt so abashed that he was about to turn away when, with a little catch in her voice, she exclaimed:

“Good heavens!”

“What is it?” he cried.

“You are not married, are you?”

“NO!!!”

Like a culprit caught she blushed furiously, and her eyes wavered as the lids fell, shutting from his eager, surprised gaze the prettiest confusion in the world.

“I–It just occurred to me to ask,” she murmured.

Crosby’s exhilaration was so great that, after a long, hungry look at the peaceful face, he jumped up and went out into the vestibule, where he whistled with all the ardor of a school-boy. When he returned to his seat beside her she was awake, and the little look of distress left her face when he appeared, a happy smile succeeding.

“I thought you had deserted me,” she said.

“Perish the thought.”

“Mr. Crosby, if you had a pistol all the time we were in the barn, why did you not shoot the dog and free us hours before you did?” she asked sternly.

“I had no pistol,” he grinned. From his pocket he drew a nickel-plated menthol inhaler and calmly leveled it at her head. “It looked very much like a pistol in the darkness,” he said, “and it deserves a place among the cherished relics descending from our romance.”

The next night two happy, contented persons sat in a brilliant Chicago theatre, and there was nothing in their appearance to indicate that the day and night before had been the most strenuous in their lives.

“This is more comfortable than a cross beam in a barn,” she smiled.

“But it is more public,” he responded.

Three months later–but Crosby won both suits.