His task would be easier, if it could be accomplished while the sick man lay undiscovered in the hospital. If he should already be dead, when he arrived, there would be an end to Brainard’s job altogether; and that would have been a keen disappointment to the young man. His job? A hundred times his mind reverted to this perplexing consideration—what, exactly, was he to do when he had reached the end of his long journey? First, he would find where Krutzmacht’s offices were, and then? He had been told to make off with whatever he might find in the private safe. For this purpose he had provided himself, in Chicago, with a bulky leather valise, in which his discarded raiment was now reposing. It all sounded like an expedition in high piracy, but he quieted any scruples with the resolve that he would make off merely to New York, if Krutzmacht still lived, instead of Berlin, and remain there to await further developments. So, as the Overland Limited rushed across the prairie states, Brainard took counsel with himself, mentally sketching out his every move from the moment when he should step from the train. The readiness with which his mind reached out to this new situation surprised himself; he was already becoming in some way a new person. The journey itself was a revelation to him and an education. With his Broadway prejudice that the United States stopped somewhere just above the Bronx and behind the Jersey hills, he was astonished to find so much habitable country beyond these horizons and so many people in it who did not seem to depend upon New York City for their livelihood or happiness. At first he was so much preoccupied with his errand and himself in his surprising new rôle that he paid little attention to the scenes spread before his eyes. Chicago impressed him only as a dirtier and more provincial New York. But the next morning when he awoke at Omaha he began to realize that America was more than a strip of land along the Atlantic seaboard, and by the time the train had left Ogden his respect for his fatherland had immensely increased.