And as Eaton went back to his compartment through the open car, Dr.
Sinclair looked up at him, but Avery, studying his cribbage hand,
pretended not to notice he was passing. So Avery admitted too that
affairs were turning toward the better, just now at least, for Eaton.
When he was again in his compartment, no one came to lock him in. The
porter who brought his breakfast a few minutes later, apologized for
its lateness, saying it had had to be brought from a club car on the
next track, whither the others in the car, except Santoine, had gone.
Eaton had barely finished with this tardy breakfast when a bumping
against the car told him that it was being coupled to a train. The new
train started, and now the track followed the Mississippi River.
Eaton, looking forward from his window as the train rounded curves, saw
that the Santoine car was now the last one of a train--presumably bound
from Minneapolis to Chicago.
South they went, through Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the weather grew
warmer and the spring further advanced. The snow was quite cleared
from the ground, and the willows beside the ditches in the fields were
beginning to show green sprouts. At nine o'clock in the evening, some
minutes after crossing the state line into Illinois, the train stopped
at a station where the last car was cut off.
A motor-ambulance and other limousine motor-cars were waiting in the
light from the station. Eaton, seated at the window, saw Santoine
carried out on a stretcher and put into the ambulance. Harriet
Santoine, after giving a direction to a man who apparently was a
chauffeur, got into the ambulance with her father. The surgeon and the
nurses rode with them. They drove off. Avery entered another
automobile, which swiftly disappeared. Conductor Connery came for the
last time to Eaton's door.
"Miss Santoine says you're to go with the man she's left here for you.
Here's the things I took from you. The money's all there. Mr.
Santoine says you've been his guest on this car."
Eaton received back his purse and bill-fold. He put them in his pocket
without examining their contents. The porter appeared with his
overcoat and hat. Eaton put them on and stepped out of the car. The
conductor escorted him to a limousine car. "This is the gentleman,"
Connery said to the chauffeur to whom Harriet Santoine had spoken. The
man opened the door of the limousine; another man, whom Eaton had not
before seen, was seated in the car; Eaton stepped in. Connery extended
his hand--"Good-by, sir."
"Good-by."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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