"Oh--make him understand, somebody." The girl followed Henry with her double handful of currency, but he backed further, sidling, his lips lifted at the corners. He was in a cold agony, a wretchedness of shaking relief and anguish of conscience. He wanted to be let alone. He wanted to creep into his old bed under the wool quilts, deep down where he could shut his ears against the penetrating jeers that clanged like sleighbells in his brain. The girl's insistence drew from him a painful burst of his rare, dreadful speech. "I don't want any money!" he shrilled. Then, snatching away from them, he leaped the fence and tore through his tiny back garden. Inside his house he jerked the blinds shut over the outraged window and sagged down in a chair, shaking from head to foot. "Now," he thought gloomily, "now--they'll tear up that spur. Now what you goin' to do, Henry Hornbone? You're a dad-blamed old fool." But something seemed to warm him as he crept half-clothed into his bed. "Gosh, that girl had little hands," he thought aloud. "Might 'a' killed her anyway. Might 'a' killed a lot of folks. Didn't kill 'em though. Didn't kill anybody." The visitor who banged on Henry's old warped front door in the morning grew weary after a while and went around to the back. The knock on the back door meant nothing to Henry's sealed ears, but the jar came presently to his senses and he opened the closed shutters and thrust out his head. The grin was absent from his grizzled face. He glowered. He scowled till he saw that the intruder upon his doorstep was feminine and young, that she had red hair and little hands and feet that looked as though dancing were their chief mission in life. Then he grinned. [Illustration] "Key's lost," he yelled suddenly, so that the girl jumped. "Can't git in." She nodded and smiled. The smile and her dancing eyes and the glow of her hair were a combination as dazzling as winter sunshine. She had manifestly come prepared. She pulled a little pad and pencil from her pocket and wrote rapidly. "Can you read?" The furious disgust in Henry's eyes was answer enough. She thought him a plumb fool then! "Sure, I can read," he shouted. "I ain't crazy. I'm just hard of hearing." Eager apology was in her smile. She scribbled rapidly. "You are a brave man," Henry read. "You saved the lives of eighty-four people." He shook his head. "I ain't brave. I'm just an old fool." She laughed at this, and it was as if the sun leaped up with a shout and a lot of nymphs and dryads and other ladies in diaphanous veils whirled in a mad dance on a hilltop. "I am the new operator at Elsie." ran her next missive. "I have a pass for you from the president of the road. You can ride anywhere you want any time you like." "Don't want to ride," grumbled Henry. "Don't want to go no place. Don't want nothing to do with your railroad--no time."