The Railroader’s face, set like carven granite, began to twitch. The rigid mouth relaxed its set whiteness and the eyelids flickered. Mrs. Conover, at these signs of life, prepared for a fresh attack of hysteria, but a gentle, firm pressure of Anice’s hand in hers forestalled the outburst. With an aggrieved look at the girl, Letty again turned her scared attention to her husband. Dr. Hawes was bending once more over the prostrate man, seeking to employ a restorative. Now he rose, and as he did so, Caleb’s eyes opened. There was no bewilderment, no surprise nor pain in the calm glance that swept his garish surroundings. “Is he suffering?” whispered Anice. “Or——?” “Horribly,” returned Dr. Hawes in the same tone. “He——” The shrewd, pale eyes that scorned to show trace of physical or mental anguish, slowly took in the group beside the couch, resting first on the two physicians, then on Anice Lanier. As he saw and recognized Anice the first change came over the dying man’s hard-set features. A look of perplexity that merged into glad surprise lighted his whole face, smoothing from it with magic touch every line of care, thought or time; transfiguring it into the countenance of a happy boy. Long he sought and held her sympathetic glance, that look of youth and gladness growing and deepening on his face, while all around stood silent and marvelling. It was Mrs. Conover who broke the spell. “Oh, Caleb!” she wailed querulously, “you _said_ no horse could get the better of you. And now——” At her words the beatific light was gone from Conover’s eyes. In its stead came a gleam of grim, ironical amusement. Then, his gaze travelling past Anice to Clive Standish, his brows contracted in a frown of displeasure. But this, too, faded. The swathed head settled lower among the cushions, the powerful body seemed to shrink and flatten. The eyes closed, and Conover lay very still. His wife, divining for the first time the actual state of affairs, flung herself forward on her knees beside the silent figure, her sobs scaling to a crescendo cry of terror. Slowly Caleb Conover opened his eyes. Reluctantly, as though drawn back by sheer force from the very threshold of the wide portals of Rest, his spirit paused for an instant longer in its earthly abode—paused and flared up, as a dying spark, in the Railroader’s stiffening face. For a moment his eyes—already wide with the awful mystery of the Beyond—strayed over his kneeling wife; over the sparse locks bunched up in that halo of kid curlers; over the pudgy shape so mercilessly outlined by the sheer nightgown; over the tear-swollen red eyes, the blotched cheeks, the quivering, pursed-up mouth. “Letty,” he panted, in tired disgust, “you look—more like a measly rabbit—every day!” THE END ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES