Handicapped by the weight of his clothes, he made the bank after two or three highly problematical minutes, arriving in the unbeautiful condition of a drenched rat. The ascent of the sticky acclivity contributed a coating of mud. As he turned miserably back he heard the approaching rumble of an express locomotive. Mr. Copewell broke wildly through the thicket toward his fire, half a mile away. Neither his exterior nor his rate of speed accorded with that staid dignity which should characterize a man going to meet his fair young bride. Mr. Copewell, however, had lost his sense of proportion. He did not care. What he wanted was to get there. The sound of the oncoming train grew louder. Mr. Copewell attained a higher rate of speed. The sweat poured into his bulging eyes. The rumble grew, gathering into a crescendo, then dropped down the scale of sound with diminuendo. He knew the train had passed. It had not stopped. It had not hesitated. The engineer was getting a good forty-five miles an hour out of his boilers! As a capstone to his arch of misfortune an outcropping root caught Mr. Copewell’s toe and threw him headlong into a deep cut. It began to look as though, in the question of his marriage, the nays had it. A very definite pain in the chest and shoulder told him that something had broken. He staggered to his feet and went more slowly. A torment in one ankle retarded him—also, there was no further need of hurrying. At the fire he discerned the peacefully recumbent figure of Mr. Connors, his head pillowed on the suit-case. “Why in —— didn’t you stop that train?” bawled Mr. Copewell in futile frenzy. “It’s like dis, pal,” confided Mr. Rat Connors placidly. “I just gets t’rowed offen one dangler, see? I ain’t goin’ ter take chances stoppin’ no fliers in places like dis. It ain’t healt’y. Meself, I knows w’en I gets plenty.” “Didn’t you agree to do it?” screamed Mr. Copewell, choking and sputtering like a cataleptic maniac. “Sure,” smiled Mr. Connors, “but I loses me noive, see?” He did not add that he had accomplished his real object when he had rifled the suit-case and that his promise had been purely strategic. Mr. Copewell sank down by the fire. Perhaps it was the shock of the wetting and a broken clavicle. Perhaps it was despair and pain combined. The blood in his temples seemed to be cascading into his eyeballs and flooding his sight with red. Slowly Mr. Copewell crumpled forward in a senseless heap on the stone-ballasted right of way. * * * * *