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While the driver of the Middlemount House barge was helping the station-master-and-baggage-man (they were one) put the arriving passengers’ trunks into the wagon for the Middlemount House, Gaites paced up and down the long platform in the remnant of his excitement, and vowed himself to have nothing more to do with Miss Desmond’s piano, even if it should turn up then and there and personally appeal to him for help. In this humor he was not prepared to have anything of the kind happen, and he stood aghast, in looking absently into a freight-car standing on the track, to read, “Miss Phyllis Desmond, Lower Merritt, N. H.,” on the slope of the now familiar case just within the open doorway. It was as if the poor girl were personally there pleading for his help with the eyes whose tenderness he remembered.

The united station-master-and-baggage-man, who appeared also to be the freight agent, came lounging down the platform toward him. He was so exactly of the rustic railroad type that he confused Gaites with a doubt as to which functionary, of the many he now knew, this was.

“Go’n’ to walk over to the hotel?” he asked.

“Yes,” Gaites faltered, and the man abruptly turned, and made the gesture for starting a locomotive to the driver of the Middlemount stage.

“All right, Jim!” he shouted, and the stage drove off.

“What time can I get a train for Lower Merritt this afternoon?” asked Gaites.

“Four o’clock,” said the man. “This freight goes out first;” and now Gaites noticed that up on a siding beyond the station an engine with a train of freight-cars was fretfully fizzing. The engineer put a silk-capped head out of the cab window and looked back at the station-master, who began to work his arms like a semaphore telegraph. Then the locomotive tooted, the bell rang, and the freight-train ran forward on the switch to the main track, and commenced backing down to where they stood. Evidently it was going to pick up the car with Phyllis Desmond’s piano in it.

“When does this freight go out?” Gaites palpitated.

“‘Bout ten minutes,” said the station-master.

“Does it stop at Lower Merritt?”

“Leaves this cah the’a,” said the man, as if surprised into the admission.

“Can I go on her?” Gaites pursued, breathlessly.

“Well, I guess you’ll have to talk to this man about that,” and the station-master indicated, with a nod of his head, the freight conductor, who was swinging himself down from the caboose, now come abreast of them on the track. A brakeman had also jumped down, and the train fastened on to the waiting car, under his manipulation, with a final cluck and jolt.

The conductor and station-master exchanged large oblong Manila-paper envelopes, and the station-master said, casually, “Here’s a man wants to go to Lower Merritt with you, Bill.”

The conductor looked amused and interested. “Eva travel in a caboose?”

“No.”

“Well, I guess you can stand it fo’ five miles, anyway.”

He turned and left Gaites, who understood this for permission, and clambered into the car, where he found himself in a rude but far from comfortless interior. There was a sort of table or desk in the middle, with a heavy chair or two before it; round the side of the car were some leather-covered benches, suitable for the hard naps which seemed to be taken on them, if he could guess from the man in overalls asleep on one.

The conductor came in, after the train started, and seemed disposed to be sociable. He had apparently gathered from the station-master so much of Gaites’s personal history as had accumulated since he left the express train at Middlemount.

“Thought you’d try a caboose for a little change from a pahla-cah,” he suggested, humorously.

“Well, yes,” Gaites partially admitted. “I did intend to stay over at Middlemount when I left the express there, but I changed my mind and decided to go on. It’s very good of you to let me come with you.”