She stood by the window. She had not lighted the lamp, so the world showed white, not black. Snow makes outdoors look big, she thought. But it was big--what a long journey it was to Idaho. Suppose ... something happened to the man he was to travel with. John Blood was only a boy; he would probably put the child's name and her address in the little traveler's pocket, and these would be lost. The child was hardly old enough to remember what to do. He would go astray, and none of them would ever know what had become of him ... and what would become of him? She saw him and his bundle of clothes alone in the station in the City.... She turned from the window and mechanically mended the fire again. She drew down the window shade and went to the coat closet to hang away her wraps. Then abruptly she took up her purse, counted out the money in the firelight, and went out the door and down the street in the dusk, and into the post office, which was also the telegraph office,--one which the little town owed to Ebenezer Rule, and it a rival to the other telegraph office at the station. "How much does it cost to send a telegram?" she demanded. "Idaho," she answered the man's question, flushing at her omission. While the man, Affer by name, laboriously looked it up,--covering incredible little dirty figures with an incredibly big dirty forefinger,--Mary stood staring at the list of names tacked below the dog-eared Christmas Notice. She remembered that she had not yet signed it herself. She asked for a pencil--causing confusion to the little figures and delay to the big finger--and, while she waited, wrote her name. "A good, sensible move," she thought, as she signed. When Affer gave her the rate, thrusting finger and figures jointly beneath the bars,--solicitous of his own accuracy,--Mary filed her message. It was to John Blood, and it read:---- "Be sure you tie his tag on him good." VII Ebenezer Rule had meant to go to the City before cold weather came. He had there a small and decent steam-warmed flat where he boiled his own eggs and made his own coffee, read his newspapers and kept his counsel, descending nightly to the ground-floor cafe to dine on ambiguous dishes at tables of other bank swallows who nested in the same cliff. But as the days went by, he found himself staying on in Old Trail Town, with this excuse and that, offered by himself to himself. As, for example, that in the factory there were old account books that he must go through. And having put off this task from day to day and finding at last nothing more to dally with, he set out one morning for the ancient building down in that part of the village which was older than the rest and was where his business was conducted when it was conducted.